You can tell when nobody designed it.
Almost nobody can name what is wrong with a bad website. Almost everybody can tell within a few seconds that something is, which is the part that matters commercially — the judgement gets made either way, whether or not the visitor could defend it.
The tells are specific, and once you know them you cannot stop seeing them.
Spacing with no rhythm
This is the most reliable tell and the hardest for a non-designer to put into words.
On a designed site, the gaps between things come from a small set of related values — 8, 16, 24, 32, 48 — used over and over. Nobody consciously counts them, but the eye picks up the repetition and reads it as order.
On an undesigned site every gap was decided on its own. Fourteen pixels here, thirty there, twenty-two underneath. Each one looks perfectly fine in isolation. Together they read as slightly unsettled, and the visitor registers it as clutter or cheapness without ever knowing they are reacting to arithmetic.
Five typefaces doing the job of two
A designed site usually runs one typeface, occasionally two, and gets all its variety from weight and size rather than from adding families.
Undesigned sites accumulate them. One arrived with the template, one came with the logo, one shipped inside a plugin, one came along with a testimonial block pasted from somewhere else. The giveaway is rarely that any single typeface is ugly — it is that two headings on the same page are set in different ones.
Colour follows exactly the same pattern. A designed palette is small: a few deliberate colours plus tints of them. An undesigned site carries a dozen near-identical dark greys, each one arriving from a different component, none of them chosen.
A hero that says nothing specific
The top of the homepage is the most valuable space the business owns, and it is routinely spent on a sentence that could belong to any company in the country.
Quality service you can trust. Delivering excellence since 2009. Your partner in success.
There is a quick test for this. Could a direct competitor put the same words on their own site without changing anything? If they could, the sentence is not doing any work — it is occupying the position where the work should be.
A specific hero names who it is for, what it does, or what is different about it. Same-day emergency plumbing across the city, seven days a week is not poetry. It is doing a job that the alternative is not.
No clear next action
A designed page has one obvious next step in view at any point, and it is usually the same step repeated down the page.
An undesigned page offers five options of equal visual weight: call us, email us, book online, download the brochure, follow us. All styled identically, none emphasised, all competing.
When everything is equally important, nothing is. The visitor now has to choose, choosing is work, and work is where people quietly leave.
The flip side: what it looks like when somebody decided
The positive version of all of this is less dramatic than people expect, and that is rather the point.
Restraint reads as confidence. Fewer elements, larger, with more room around them. The same button in the same place doing the same thing every time it appears. A hierarchy clear enough that you could squint at the page and still know what matters most. Photography that is obviously of this business and these people, rather than a stock library.
Designed sites usually look simpler than undesigned ones, which is exactly why the work gets underestimated. Removing things and committing to one direction is harder and takes longer than adding another section.
What this has to do with AI
AI has become genuinely good at producing something that looks like a website. Sensible structure, plausible sections, consistent spacing, a reasonable type scale. The mechanical tells above are steadily disappearing from generated work, and that is a real improvement over the template era.
What it cannot do is decide what this particular business should look like to this particular customer.
That decision does not live in any training data. It lives in knowing that the client actually makes their margin on commercial contracts rather than domestic callouts, that most of their enquiries come from one part of town, that every competitor in the category looks aggressive and so calm is sitting there unclaimed. None of that is visible from the outside, and all of it changes what the site should be.
So the failure mode has shifted rather than disappeared. The new one is not an ugly site — it is a competent, well-spaced, entirely anonymous site that could belong to anyone. It passes every mechanical check and still says nothing.
You can still tell when nobody designed it. It just takes a few seconds longer than it used to.