40 Banned Phrases That Mark Your Copy as AI-Generated (with Replacements)

If your homepage says "Effortlessly streamline your workflow" near the top, your visitors already know an AI wrote it. Not because the sentence is wrong — it parses fine — but because tens of thousands of AI-generated landing pages say the same thing, in the same words, with the same rhythm. Users have learned to recognize the pattern.

Sailop's copy dimension catches 40+ specific phrases that betray AI authorship. Each one shows up disproportionately in AI output and almost never in copy written by humans with skin in the game. Below is the full list, why each one is a tell, and what to write instead.

Why these phrases are tells

Three things make a phrase "AI slop":

1. Frequency. A word like "effortlessly" appears in roughly 60% of AI-generated landing-page hero subheads. In human-written copy from comparable sources, it appears in less than 4%. The frequency gap is the signal.

2. Vagueness. Phrases like "AI-powered" or "next-generation" describe nothing concrete. They could appear on a landing page for any product. Human copy tends to be more specific because the writer actually knows what the product does.

3. Drift. Phrases that started as legitimate marketing language get drained of meaning by overuse. "Built for the modern web" meant something specific in 2018. By 2026, it is filler that signals "the AI ran out of specific things to say."

Sailop's copy scanner weights each phrase by frequency × distinctiveness. A phrase used once in your codebase scores low. The same phrase used three times across your hero, features, and CTA scores high.

The list

Action verbs that mean nothing

1. Effortlessly — Appears in 60% of AI hero subheads. *Replacement:* describe what is hard about the alternative. "No more reading 200-line PR diffs" beats "effortlessly review code."

2. Seamlessly — The most overused adverb in AI-generated copy. *Replacement:* describe the integration point. "Plugs into your CI as a single GitHub Action" beats "seamlessly integrates with your CI."

3. Streamline — Empty productivity verb. *Replacement:* show the time saved. "Cut your code-review time from 40 to 8 minutes" beats "streamline your code review."

4. Unlock — Marketing genre tic. *Replacement:* describe what becomes available. "Get access to 50 design templates" beats "unlock 50 design templates."

5. Empower — Corporate yoga. *Replacement:* state the capability. "Lets your team ship without a designer" beats "empowers your team to ship."

6. Transform — When the verb is a hedge for "we are not sure what this does." *Replacement:* state the before-and-after concretely. "Convert your 800-line homepage into 12 reusable sections" beats "transform your homepage."

7. Revolutionize — Banned outright. Nothing on the modern web revolutionizes anything. *Replacement:* be specific about what you are improving. "10x faster than running pre-commit hooks manually."

8. Supercharge — Buick-era marketing. *Replacement:* state the speed factor. "20x faster scanning than ESLint."

Adjectives that describe nothing

9. Powerful — Modifier with no information content. *Replacement:* describe the specific capability. "Catches 298 distinct AI fingerprints" beats "powerful AI detection."

10. Robust — Always means "we can't be specific about what it does." *Replacement:* state the test conditions. "Tested on 30 production codebases ranging from 5K to 800K LOC."

11. Cutting-edge — Banned. By the time you call your product cutting-edge, it is not. *Replacement:* state the actual difference. "Built on the 2026 MCP spec, works with every major AI agent."

12. Next-generation — Same problem as cutting-edge. Banned. *Replacement:* describe the generational difference. "First scanner built for 2026 AI agents instead of legacy linting."

13. Innovative — A claim, not a description. Tells the reader nothing. *Replacement:* say what you do differently. "Procedural design system generation — no other anti-slop tool ships this."

14. Comprehensive — A defensive adjective. Means "we listed a lot of things." *Replacement:* count them. "Catches 298 patterns across 7 dimensions."

15. Game-changing — Banned. Sportswriter cliché. *Replacement:* state what changes. "Reduces slop scores by 50–60 points in a single transform pass."

16. World-class — Whose world? *Replacement:* describe the benchmark. "Lower slop than Anthropic's official frontend skill on 8/10 test cases."

17. State-of-the-art — Says nothing about the actual state of any art. *Replacement:* describe the benchmark or skip the modifier.

18. Blazingly fast — Pop slang as marketing copy. *Replacement:* numbers. "Scans 50,000 lines in 312ms."

Compound qualifiers

19. AI-powered — Banned when your product is not actually about AI. Even when it is, "powered by" reads as filler. *Replacement:* describe the model or technique. "Uses Claude Opus 4.6 to generate alternative palettes."

20. AI-native — Buzzword. *Replacement:* state the integration. "First-class MCP support for Claude Code, Cursor, Continue, Aider."

21. Cloud-native — Genre tic. *Replacement:* describe the deployment story. "Deploy as a Vercel serverless function in two clicks."

22. Enterprise-grade — Classist framing. *Replacement:* describe the actual capability. "SOC 2 Type 2, single-tenant on request."

23. Production-ready — Always a claim, never a guarantee. *Replacement:* show the production usage. "Used by 12 teams in production, including [Company X]."

24. Built for the modern web — Filler. *Replacement:* state which frameworks you support. "Works with Next.js 15+, Remix, Astro, SvelteKit."

25. End-to-end — Implies completeness without describing it. *Replacement:* list the steps. "From scan → transform → CI gate → deploy."

Hero phrases

26. Welcome to our platform — The AI-default hero h1. Banned. *Replacement:* state the verb the user is trying to do. "Stop shipping AI-generated slop."

27. The future of [thing] — Genre cliché. *Replacement:* describe a present capability. "What every AI agent should generate but doesn't."

28. Built for [vague audience] — "Built for developers." "Built for teams." Banned. *Replacement:* be specific. "Built for indie devs who use Cursor." "Built for SaaS teams of 5–50."

29. The all-in-one [thing] — Empty completeness claim. *Replacement:* list the components. "CLI + MCP server + 50 templates + design system generator."

30. Take your [thing] to the next level — Banned. *Replacement:* describe the target level. "Drop your slop score from 80 to 20."

Proof phrases

31. Trusted by leading companies — Always followed by 5 grayscale logos. *Replacement:* name them, full color, with context. "Used at Stripe to gate the design system PR."

32. Used by thousands of developers — Vanity metric. *Replacement:* concrete number with date. "5,200 npm installs in the first 30 days."

33. The #1 [thing] for [audience] — Unprovable claim. *Replacement:* show the ranking. "Highest GitHub-star count among anti-slop tools (4.8k as of April 2026)."

CTAs

34. Get started — The default AI CTA. Says nothing. *Replacement:* describe the action. "Install via npm." "Scan my codebase." "Buy the bundle for €475."

35. Sign up free — Vague. *Replacement:* describe what becomes available. "Free for unlimited scans."

36. Learn more — The ghost CTA. *Replacement:* describe the destination. "Read the docs." "See the rule list." "Compare to Cursor."

37. Join us — Cult framing. *Replacement:* state the action. "Read the changelog." "Subscribe to releases."

Closing phrases

38. Take control of your [thing] — Manipulative. *Replacement:* describe the capability. "Set your slop threshold per project."

39. Don't get left behind — Manipulative. *Replacement:* describe what you would miss. "Sailop catches 23 patterns ESLint and Prettier don't."

40. The choice is yours — Filler. *Replacement:* skip the line entirely. The reader knows the choice is theirs.

How Sailop scores copy

The copy dimension runs every chunk of text in your codebase against this corpus. Each match contributes to the score, weighted by:

• Frequency in the file. One "seamlessly" is a yellow flag. Three is a red flag.
• Position in the document. Hero copy gets weighted 2x. CTA copy gets weighted 1.5x. Footer copy gets weighted 0.5x.
• Cluster proximity. Two banned phrases in the same sentence get a multiplier.

Run sailop scan ./src --dimension=copy and you get a per-file breakdown with line numbers and replacement suggestions.

What to do instead

The shortcut: be specific. Replace every adjective with a number, every adverb with a comparison, every vague verb with a concrete verb. The rewrite is usually shorter and always clearer.

The longer answer: write copy you would defend in a pitch meeting. AI-generated copy is what survives committee review because nobody disagrees with it. Real copy is what one person believes and signs their name to. The phrases banned above are the ones that survive when nobody believes anything in particular.

For the broader anti-slop strategy see the definitive AI slop guide. For the visual fingerprints (color, typography, layout, motion), the 10 dead giveaways covers each one with code examples.

npx sailop install
sailop scan ./src --dimension=copy

Free to scan. €49 for the full toolkit. Or browse 50 templates where every line of copy was rewritten until none of these phrases survived.