The subtitle problem: how to spot an AI-generated website

Somewhere in the last two years, every website started sounding like the same competent stranger.

You can see it before you read a word. A small grey label sits above the heading. The heading is confident and slightly abstract. Beneath it, in lighter grey, sits one tidy line explaining what the heading just said. Then it happens again. And again. By the fourth repetition you are not reading, you are scrolling, and the page has taught you that nothing below is worth stopping for.

That rhythm is the clearest tell of an AI-generated website, and it is not really about artificial intelligence at all. It is about what happens when nobody makes a decision. A model asked for a section returns a label, a headline and a supporting line, because that is the safest shape. A human who knows the business writes an unbalanced page, because the business is unbalanced. One capability is worth three paragraphs and the other four are worth a sentence each.

How do you spot an AI-generated website?

Ignore the writing quality. It is usually fine. Look at the shape.

Every section is the same height. Real subject matter refuses to be evenly distributed. If the page about your machining tolerances is the same length as the page about your company values, one of those pages is padding.

The subtitle repeats the heading. “Built for scale. We build solutions designed to scale with your business.” That sentence exists because the layout had a slot for it, not because anyone needed it. Its only function is to give the eye something to slide off.

Three cards. Always three. Three columns, three icons, three headings of near-identical length. A shield for security, a lightning bolt for speed, some concentric circles for whatever the third one is. Nobody chose those icons. They came with the layout, they mean nothing individually, and collectively they mean the page has run out of things to say but still has vertical space to fill.

The copy describes the service, not the problem. “We provide comprehensive fabrication services tailored to your requirements” tells a procurement engineer nothing they can act on. “Most of what we do is 316L in small batches with a two-week turn, and we will tell you upfront when a job is not right for us” tells them everything, including that a person wrote it.

The sentences balance too well. Two clauses, a comma, gentle symmetry, no risk. Read three of them aloud and you will notice they are the same sentence wearing different nouns. Nothing in them could be argued with, which is another way of saying nothing in them was claimed.

Why any of this costs money

The ranking argument is real but secondary. Google does not object to AI writing as such, it objects to volume without value, and after its 2024 spam and core updates it reported showing 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content in search results than before. That is a floor, not a strategy.

The commercial problem is sharper. A B2B buyer arrives on your site already holding three or four tabs. They are not evaluating your prose, they are looking for the one detail that separates you from the other tabs. Generic copy withholds exactly that detail, because generic copy is produced by removing everything specific enough to be wrong.

And specificity is the whole game in technical sectors. Across 54 Singapore B2B sites we reviewed in August 2026, the most common thing missing was not polish. It was evidence: what the company had actually done, for whom, at what scale. A site can be immaculately designed, perfectly balanced, and still fail to answer the only question the visitor came with.

Why we deleted every subtitle on our own site

We used to do it too. Eyebrow, headline, one line of explanation, next section. It looked orderly in the design file. In the browser it read like someone clearing their throat before every sentence.

So we removed them sitewide. Not softened, removed. The rule now is that if a heading needs a line underneath explaining what it means, the heading is wrong and we rewrite the heading. Most of the time the explanatory line was doing one of two things: apologising for a vague headline, or padding a section that was thin to begin with. Both problems are better solved than decorated.

The effect on the pages was not subtle. Sections got shorter and more uneven. Some got noticeably longer, because once the decorative line was gone the emptiness underneath was obvious and had to be filled with something real. That is the useful part. Removing the subtitle is a diagnostic, not a style choice. It shows you which sections have content and which ones were shape.

You can see the same logic on the Towa Marine site, where a superintendent needs to know within seconds whether a yard covers their system and whether anyone will answer at two in the morning. The page leads with the systems and the response commitment. There is no line underneath explaining that marine air conditioning is important, because the person reading already knows.

The test

Open your homepage. Delete every sentence that sits directly beneath a heading and explains it.

If the page still makes sense, those sentences were never content. If a section collapses entirely, you have found the part of your site that was never written, only formatted. Either result is worth knowing, and neither requires a redesign to fix.

Then check the icons. If you cannot say what each one is doing that a word could not do better, it is not an icon, it is upholstery.

We write the copy on the projects we build, which is why we are unreasonable about this. Our pricing bands include copywriting from the standard band up, and it is not an upsell so much as a refusal, because a technical site written by someone who does not understand the technical part will always default to the safe shape. That shape is exactly the one you are trying to get away from.