If you have looked at small business websites or new software products lately, you know the picture. A dark background with a purple-to-blue gradient, a big headline with one word highlighted, three equal cards with icons underneath, then testimonials from people who don’t exist. People call it “AI slop”: content made quickly with AI that doesn’t look like anything in particular. On developer forums the same complaint shows up as “vibe-coded websites all look the same”.
The AI alone is rarely to blame. It comes down to what you give it, and what you let it skip.
Where the house style comes from
A language model answers every request with the most likely continuation. Ask for “a modern website for an accounting firm” and the most likely answer is an average of the many sites the model has seen. The result is tidy and interchangeable. Three things make it worse.
The same building blocks. Many AI tools build with the same popular component libraries and keep their defaults: the same corner radius, the same shadows, the same typeface. Change nothing and you get the library’s look.
The same requests. “Modern”, “clean”, “minimal”, “professional”. These words appear in nearly every prompt, and they leave the model the most room, so it lands on the average.
No material of your own. Without real copy the AI invents some. Without your own photos it reaches for icons and gradients. The things that set a business apart are exactly what goes missing.
Till Heidrich’s view: To me the house style isn’t a question of taste. It shows that nobody decided who the site is for. A website that suits everyone ends up suiting no one in particular, and visitors notice.
The usual patterns
These turn up again and again. One on its own is fine. Several together make a site feel arbitrary.
- purple, blue or teal gradients as a background, often with glowing edges
- one word of the headline in gradient colour or italics
- three equal cards with an icon, a heading and two lines of text
- testimonials with made-up names and stock photos
- stock phrases like “Unlock your potential” or “a seamless experience”
- number blocks without a source (“98% happy customers”)
- phone mock-ups and floating dashboard images, even for businesses without an app
How to spot these on other people’s sites is covered in How to spot an AI-made website. This article is about avoiding them on your own.
The parts you can’t see: accessibility and quality
The house style is not just about looks. A case study from January 2025 checked a page generated without accessibility instructions and found, among other things, contrast ratios between 1:1 and 2.2:1, missing headings and controls that a keyboard couldn’t reach. It is a preprint about one page, but it shows where to look.
The WebAIM Million 2026 report suggests that quickly AI-built sites may be adding to the number of errors. WebAIM didn’t measure that, so we only quote it as a suggestion. What it did measure is that 95.9 percent of the most visited home pages have automatically detectable errors. The most common one is low contrast.
What Google says
In 2023 Google said it rates content on quality, not on whether a person or a machine wrote it. Its spam policies also list “scaled content abuse”: large numbers of pages produced mainly for search engines that offer readers nothing. A generic design isn’t a violation. Generic copy produced at scale can be.
Seven instructions against the house style
Give these to your AI agent before it writes the first line of code.
1. Content first, design second
Write the key copy yourself: what the business does, for whom, where, roughly what a job costs, who to talk to. The AI may polish it but not invent it. Real copy produces real headlines, and a headline like “Boiler broken? We’re there tomorrow” doesn’t need a gradient.
2. Your own photos as the starting point
A good photo of the team, the workshop or a finished job beats any illustration. If you have no photos, a calm layout built on typography is better than stock images everyone has seen before.
3. References from other industries
Use only roofers’ sites as models for a roofer and you get the industry average. A book publisher, an architecture studio or a magazine can be a better reference. Write one sentence per reference about what exactly you want to take from it.
4. Tight limits on type and colour
Fix one or two typefaces, a small palette with checked contrast and set spacing values. The tighter the frame, the less the AI slides back into defaults. Take the colours from the business’s real world: the van livery, the workwear, the materials.
5. Structure follows content
A business with four services doesn’t need three cards. A business with one service doesn’t need cards at all. Let the agent derive the layout from the copy, not from a template.
6. A list of things to avoid
Write down what must not appear: no gradient backgrounds, no testimonials without a real source, no numbers without evidence, no stock phrases. A short list like this works surprisingly well because it rules out exactly the default answers.
7. Compare and check
Finally, compare. Does the page look too much like one of the references? Then the reference was a template, not a direction. After that come the checks for contrast, keyboard access and load time. Check your website’s accessibility yourself shows how without a paid tool.
What an instruction sheet looks like
The seven points fit on one page. Here is an example for an electrician’s business, the way you might hand it to an AI agent before the first draft:
- Audience: homeowners within about 20 miles who are planning an EV charger or solar panels. Many read on their phones, in the evening.
- Goal of the home page: a call or a callback request. Nothing else matters more.
- Copy: attached. Shorten it if needed, invent nothing. No testimonials until we have real ones with permission.
- Photos: twelve of our own are attached; the photo of the van is the most important.
- References: a book publisher’s site (for the large type and calm columns) and an architecture studio’s site (for how photos are cropped). Don’t trace anything; they set a direction.
- Limits: one typeface for everything, two colours from the van livery plus greys, at least 4.5:1 contrast for text.
- Not allowed: gradients, icons instead of photos, three cards in a row, stock phrases, numbers without a source.
- Checks: keyboard, 200 percent zoom, phone view at 390 pixels, no fonts or scripts from other companies’ servers.
None of this is secret. It is a brief of the kind a good agency would write. The difference from the default request is that the AI is left with hardly any gaps to fill with the average.
Before and after, in words
A typical default request produces something like this: dark page, gradient, “Your partner for electrical engineering”, three cards (installation, maintenance, consulting), testimonials, contact form.
With the instructions above it becomes, for example: a light page with a large photo of the company’s own van, the headline “EV chargers and solar in the district, from a local master electrician”, the service area beneath it, a price range for a standard charger with a note on what it depends on, and a phone number big enough to tap on a phone. Fewer effects, more information.
The shortcut: a design that is already distinct
If you’d rather not steer the design yourself, start from a finished one and only change content and photos. The designs in the gallery are made for invented brands with their own typography and imagery, checked for accessibility and load time, and come with a token file so an AI agent stays within the system while adapting them. The full process without Figma is in Designing a website with AI, without Figma.