TL;DR
- "AI slop" is what people call content that's cheap, generic and made in bulk. Websites get the label too, and people spot it in seconds.
- Slop isn't about AI. It's about nobody making the decisions. Themes and templates made sites look the same long before AI did. AI just made it free and instant.
- The tells fall into four groups: how it looks, what it says, what it claims and what nobody checked.
- Dodging a list doesn't work either. Ban Inter and purple, and you get Instrument Serif and mono captions instead. The list keeps growing.
- The fix isn't avoiding AI. It's making the calls AI can't make for you: your words, your photos, one thing that's only yours, and a check before you ship.
- A template is where your site starts. Ship it as it came and it'll look like everyone else's. That includes mine.
Yes, I build templates with AI
I'm Lauri Lännenmäki, a design engineer. I've spent fifteen years designing and building for the web, and these days I build my website templates with an AI agent. (Here's how that went.)
So yeah, I have a stake in this. You should know that before you read on.
But this isn't a post about defending my templates. It's about how to spot slop when you see it, and how to make sure your own site isn't slop. Doesn't matter if you start from my template, someone else's, or a blank prompt.
Let's dig in!
What people mean by "AI slop"
Merriam-Webster made "slop" its word of the year for 2025: low-quality digital content, usually made in bulk with AI.
For websites, you know the one. You've seen it a thousand times. You can't tell who made it, or what they sell, until the third scroll. And by then you're not sure you believe a word of it.
But notice what people aren't complaining about. Nobody minds that AI was used. They mind that it shows.
The tells
Any one of these on its own is fine. It's when the whole page is made of them, and nobody chose any of them, that people notice. Pretty much instantly.
How it looks
- A purple-to-blue gradient, with a glowing blob behind the headline.
- A centred hero with a little pill badge above it: "✨ Now with AI".
- Gradient text on the one word that matters.
- One default sans-serif for everything, in one weight. The font isn't the problem. Nobody choosing it is.
- A small uppercase caption above every single heading, usually in a mono font.
- Three feature cards with an outline icon each. Then a bento grid. Then three more cards.
- The same rounded corners and the same soft shadow on every box.
What it says
- Headlines that could sell anything: "Elevate your workflow", "Unlock your potential", "Built for the future of work".
- Adjectives instead of facts: seamless, powerful, stunning, next-level.
- Every other sentence built the same way: "It's not just a tool. It's a movement."
- Everything in threes. Fast. Simple. Powerful.
- Emoji as bullet points.
What it claims
- A wall of logos from companies that have never heard of you.
- Testimonials from people who don't exist, with AI headshots.
- A row of big round numbers: 10x faster, 99.9% uptime, 500+ integrations.
- "Trusted by 10,000+ teams" on a site that launched last Tuesday.
What nobody checked
- Light grey text on white that you have to squint at.
- A layout that breaks on a phone, or scrolls sideways.
- No visible focus when you press Tab, and menus you can't open with a keyboard.
- Links that go to
#, the template's name still in the footer, "Lorem ipsum" in the share preview. - A white screen for five seconds while 4 MB of animation loads.
The first three groups are about sameness. The last one is about care. Most slop has both.
Here's the whole set on one page. Sarah J., CEO at Company, sends her regards.
Slop is older than AI
I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of templates in my day. Before this shop, I made Framer templates by hand. And sameness was always there.
There was the era when every agency site opened with the same full-screen image slider. Then every startup drew its people in the same flat illustration style, the one with tiny heads and long, bendy arms. Then every SaaS page got the same dark hero with a glowing gradient in it.
None of that was AI. It was defaults: a popular theme, a UI kit, a template, shipped as it came.
Even the purple is a default. Back in 2020, Tailwind UI shipped its example buttons in indigo. That indigo got copied into a mountain of code, and the models learned from that code. In 2025, Tailwind's creator Adam Wathan apologised for it on X.
AI didn't invent sameness. It just made it free and instant.
A model that learned from millions of websites gives you something close to the average website, unless somebody tells it otherwise. And the average website is exactly what people have learned to scroll past.
The list keeps growing
Dan (@pizzaboy) recently posted a list of things AI has ruined for designers. Instrument Serif. Em dashes. Gradient text. Eyebrow captions and mono captions. Two-column heroes. Purple, twice. And numbers. Just... numbers.
(There isn't a single em dash in this post, by the way. Make of that what you will.)
It's a joke, but it's also kind of true. And look at that list again: most of it is good stuff. Instrument Serif is a lovely free typeface. Mono captions, two-column heroes and numbers are just normal design. Designers picked them because they worked. Then they got popular, then they ended up in the training data, and now they're what AI reaches for when it wants to look tasteful.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has a name for this: distributional convergence. Ask a model for a landing page with no guidance and it lands on the safe middle: Inter, purple gradients on white, barely any animation. Tell it to avoid those, and it drifts to the next popular thing instead. Their own example is Space Grotesk.
So here's the thing: you can't avoid your way out of slop. Ban Inter and purple, and you get Instrument Serif and mono captions. If you design by dodging a list, the list is still making the decisions.
And I'll be honest: by Dan's list, I'm guilty too. Nocturne, my template for an AI sleep coach of all things, is deep blue-black with indigo and violet, and every heading and number is set in Instrument Serif. This site uses small mono caps for its eyebrows and labels. Eight of my nineteen templates use a mono typeface somewhere.
I'm keeping all of it. Nocturne is a night sky: a moon, a starfield, and a breathing timer you press and hold. Deep blue and a quiet serif are what that feels like. That's a decision. Picking the same things because they're what "tasteful" looks like this year isn't.
Slop is what you get when nobody made the decisions
Every website is a long list of decisions. What to say first. What to leave out. Which typeface, which colour, which one thing people will remember.
A slop site is one where every one of those was left at the default. And it doesn't matter if the default came from a model, a theme or a UI kit.
Here's what making those decisions looks like in practice, from my own templates. The agent wrote the code. These calls were mine.
- Ashlar is a real-estate template. Before it was built, I checked five other real-estate templates and listed what they all do: stat counters, testimonials, an FAQ, a grid of listing cards. Ashlar has none of them. I even dropped a good idea, a hero framed through a doorway, because one of the five already did it. The copy has rules too: never "luxury", "dream", "stunning" or "exclusive". In its own words, "Larch, unfinished" beats "stunning timber".
- Cistern is a site for a home battery. One version was built around a water tank. It worked. It also looked childish, so out it went, and I started over: near-black, one champagne accent, and a lit graphite slab instead of a water tank.
- Purple Sector is a web-performance studio dressed as a 1990s TV timing screen. It borrows the look of motorsport graphics and nothing else: no cars, no helmets, no real teams or drivers. Same rule as every template I've made: don't copy anything. Ever. The references set the mood. Everything on the page is made from scratch.
None of that is the agent's job. It'll happily build the water tank, the stat counters and the doorway. Saying no is the part only you can do.
A template is where your site starts
Now the uncomfortable part, for someone who sells templates.
Even when a template is full of good decisions, they're my decisions, made for a business that doesn't exist. Ship it as it came and you have someone else's site with your logo on it.
That's slop too. Not because AI built it, but because nobody made it yours.
So let's be clear about what a template is for.
What a template should handle for you: the structure, a layout that works on every screen, readable contrast, keyboard access, reduced motion, fast pages, clean code. The boring, correct stuff you shouldn't have to solve again.
What it can't handle for you: what you actually do, how you talk about it, your real photos, your real proof, and the one thing people will remember you by.
Ashlar is a good example. Its 21 house photos were generated with AI. The houses don't exist. They're in the demo so it looks finished, and the README says to replace them before launch and never to present them as real properties. A real-estate site with made-up houses on it isn't just slop. It's lying.
Five changes that make a template yours
1. Rewrite every word
Not tweak. Rewrite. The demo copy was written for a made-up business, and it reads like it.
Swap adjectives for facts. If a headline would work just as well on your competitor's site, it isn't done.
- Before: "Elevate your brand with stunning, modern design."
- After: "We build websites for physiotherapy clinics. Most go live in three weeks."
The second one isn't clever. It's just true and specific. That's what makes it yours.
2. Use real photos
Your team, your work, your place. A decent phone photo of something real beats a polished stock photo (or an AI image) of nothing. Every time.
Don't have them yet? Take them before you launch, not after.
3. Change one thing in the brand, properly
You don't need a full redesign. One colour or one typeface is enough to move it away from the demo. Change it where the template keeps its design tokens, so it follows everywhere, then check the contrast again.
4. Cut what you don't need
A template shows everything it can do. You don't need all of it.
No testimonials yet? Delete the section. Don't fake it. Three services, not six. A shorter site is easier to make yours.
5. Keep one thing that's only yours
One detail people remember: a photo, a line, a tool, a number that's true.
Every template I sell has a signature effect. Keep it, retune it (speed, colours, on or off), or swap it for something of your own. Just make sure there's something on the page nobody else has.
Check it before you ship
Slop is also what nobody checked. And honestly, checking is the easy part.
This isn't theory. The first build of Ashlar had more than 60 contrast failures. Sixty. Grey text a shade too light, on a page that looked great. Nobody catches all of those by eye. A checker finds every one in seconds.
Ten minutes before you launch:
- Read every headline out loud. Could a competitor use it unchanged? Rewrite it.
- Search for leftovers: the template's name, "lorem", "example.com" and links to
#. - Make every claim true. Numbers, logos, quotes. If you can't back it up, it goes.
- Open it on your phone and scroll the whole page. Nothing should move sideways.
- Press Tab through the page. You should always see where you are.
- Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, and an accessibility checker like axe DevTools (a free browser extension). Fix contrast first.
- Turn on "reduce motion" in your system settings and reload. The page should still look finished.
- Send the link to a friend and ask what you do. If they can't say it in one sentence, the copy isn't done.
- Run the reverse squint test. Paste a screenshot into a fresh AI chat and ask which AI app builder made it. If it can guess, so can your visitors. (A tip from the Robots on Payroll newsletter.)
Basic stuff, but someone has to do it.
Every template I sell goes through the same kind of list before it ships: no serious accessibility issues, readable contrast, works with a keyboard, respects reduced motion, no requests to third-party servers, no sideways scrolling from 360 to 1920 pixels wide. That covers the boring, correct part. The words, the claims and the leftovers are on you.
If you work with an AI agent, let it do the first pass. It doesn't get bored:
Review this site like a picky first-time visitor. List every headline
that could belong to any company, every claim I can't back up (numbers,
logos, quotes), every leftover placeholder (the template's name, lorem
ipsum, example.com, links to #), and every place where text contrast is
below WCAG AA. Don't fix anything yet. Give me the list, grouped.
Then you decide what to change. That last step is the whole point.
FAQ
Is everything made with AI slop?
No. Slop is generic, unchecked and made without care. Something can be built with AI and be none of those things. Something can be made by hand and be all of them.
Does Google penalise websites built with AI?
Not for being built with AI. Google's guidance is about whether content is useful to people. Using AI to churn out lots of pages without adding value can fall under its spam policy on scaled content abuse. A real business site with real content about what you do isn't that.
Can people tell a site was made with AI?
They can tell when it's generic. When it isn't, there's not much to tell.
I've seen this with my own templates. Nobody called them AI slop until I said they were built with AI. Before that, they were just templates.
Do I have to rewrite everything if I start from a template?
The words and the photos, yes. The structure, the code and the checks, no. That's the part you're paying for.
Are your templates AI slop?
Short answer: no. Long answer: this whole post. But you're the judge: every template has a live demo you can click through. Ship one without changing it, though, and yeah, your site will be.
Wrap-up
AI made the average website free. The way out is the same as it's always been: make the decisions, use real things, and check your work before you ship.
A good template, mine included, gets you through the boring, correct part fast. So you have time for the part only you can do.
If you want a starting point where that part is already done, the templates are here. Just don't ship them as they came.
If you read this far, thank you! 🙏
