We Checked 100 Websites for AI: What We Found

Updated October 15, 2026. 8 min read

Before we put Bot or Built in front of anyone, we tested it on 100 real websites: sites built with AI website builders, AI content farms named in press investigations, and long-running human-written sites. Some results confirmed what we expected. Others forced us to change the scoring, admit a limitation and throw out an idea we liked. Here is the full account.

The short version

• Human sites: after fixes, none of the 50 scored above "Built by humans". The highest score was 9 out of 100.
• AI builder sites: we identified 25 of 32 sites built with Durable or Lovable.
• AI content farms: we missed nearly all of the ones still online. Popular writing tells didn't separate them from human sites.
• Old investigations age fast: 8 of the 18 farms we took from 2023 to 2025 reports were dead, parked or redirected.

How we tested

We ran every site through the live version of Bot or Built in a normal browser, the same way a visitor would. For each site we recorded the score, every clue the checker reported and, separately, raw text measurements that don't depend on any threshold.

The three groups

• 50 human-written sites. Personal blogs with archives going back a decade or more, food and travel blogs, newsrooms, design and documentation sites, and company sites. We checked 55 in total; five couldn't be analysed because of blocked automated access, timeouts or server errors, so we replaced them to keep the group at 50 usable sites.
• 35 AI builder sites. Taken from public technology-tracker lists of sites using Durable and Lovable. Two didn't respond. One turned out not to be a Lovable site at all (more on that below), leaving 32.
• 18 AI content farms. Sites named as AI-generated by NewsGuard, MIT Technology Review and Nieman Lab between 2023 and 2025.

This is a small, hand-picked sample. It is enough to catch obvious problems, not to publish accuracy percentages with confidence intervals.

Results

Finding 1: builder fingerprints work, if you read them correctly

Sites generated by Durable and Lovable leave traces in their code, such as images served from cdn.durable.com or paths containing lovable-uploads. When these traces were present, they were reliable: every Durable or Lovable fingerprint we found in a site's code belonged to a site the trackers also listed.

The seven we missed showed no trace on the pages we read. Most delivered almost no HTML and built their pages entirely with scripts we don't download, or had very little content at all.

We also made two mistakes here, both now fixed:

• We flagged stripe.com as AI-built. Stripe's homepage shows Lovable in a carousel of customers, and our first version counted any mention of a builder's domain. We now only count fingerprints in a page's code, such as scripts, stylesheets, image paths and attributes, never visible text or ordinary links.
• We missed sites because Durable moved house. Our first rule looked for durable.co. Durable now serves images from cdn.durable.com, and newer sites only reference that.

And one correction to the source data: a company listed by a tracker as a Lovable site turned out to have a conventionally built homepage that simply linked to a separate promotional page hosted on Lovable. We removed it from the AI group.

Finding 2: modern AI content farms slipped through

This is the result we least wanted and most need to be honest about. Of the content farms still publishing, none scored above "Built by humans". The checker found nothing it could rely on.

The raw measurements show why. Across the human sites, a list of about 80 "AI-favourite" words such as delve, tapestry and seamless appeared 0 to 1.8 times per 1,000 words. Across the farms, 0 to 2.5 times. Em dashes ranged from 0 to 15 per 1,000 words on human sites and 0 to 8 on farms. Sentence-length variation overlapped almost completely. We wrote up these findings in detail in our article on detecting AI writing.

The farms also run on ordinary WordPress, so there is no builder fingerprint, and several sit on domains between 13 and 24 years old.

Finding 3: content farms are disposable

Of the 18 farms named in investigations between 2023 and 2025, four no longer resolved at all, three had been parked or re-registered with almost no content, and one redirected to an unrelated site. That is 8 of 18 gone or changed. Operators treat sites as disposable, which also means any static list of "known AI sites" goes stale within months.

Finding 4: old domains are a warning sign, not a comfort

Our first version gave a small bonus to long-established domains, on the logic that a site registered in 2005 is less likely to be generated end to end. The farms proved this backwards. Several live on old domains that once belonged to a newspaper, a radio station or a business, bought after they expired precisely because old domains carry trust. Nieman Lab reported on this pattern in 2025. We removed the bonus.

Finding 5: a promising signal we had to drop

If farms buy old domains and fill them with new content, we reasoned, then an old domain whose pages are all recent should be suspicious. We checked the dates in sitemaps. On one farm, the oldest of about 1,400 pages was from 2024 on a domain registered in 2010. On another, 90% of articles appeared after mid-2025 on a 24-year-old domain.

Then we ran the same check on human sites with dated sitemaps. Seven of 26 showed the same pattern, including a blog that has published since the late 1990s, because their publishing software marks every page as recently updated. A signal that flags a quarter of honest sites is worse than no signal, so we didn't ship it.

What we changed

• Builder fingerprints are matched only in code, with updated signatures for Durable and Lovable.
• Removed the "established domain" bonus.
• Reduced or removed signals that fired on human sites: em-dash counts, batch publishing dates, AI image names and placeholder names like "John Doe".
• Kept the AI-vocabulary signal, because it never fired falsely on a human site, but we no longer pretend it catches professional farms.
• Lowered the weight of emoji bullet points after they turned up on two human sites in the final round of testing. We had previously seen them only on AI sites.

What this means if you use the checker

Bot or Built is reliable at telling you a site was generated by an AI builder, and it is careful not to accuse human-written sites. It is not reliable at catching AI-written text on a conventionally built site. If the checker says "Built by humans", read that as "no technical or publishing evidence of AI was found", not as a guarantee. For anything important, combine it with the manual checks in our content farm guide.

We plan to rerun this test regularly and publish the results, including the parts that don't flatter us.