Web Design
Why Landing Pages Look Like AI Slop
Generic gradients, vague promises and three identical feature cards. Why landing pages look machine-made, and how to make yours feel human.
/6 min read
You have seen this page. A purple-to-blue gradient behind a headline that promises to "unlock the power of" something. Three cards, each with an icon, a two-word title and one sentence of nothing. A row of logos. A testimonial from someone with a first name and no last name.
You could swap in any company's name and nothing on the page would need to change. That is the problem, and it is the real meaning of the phrase "AI slop".
What "AI slop" actually means
It does not mean that AI was involved. Plenty of excellent pages are written with help from AI tools, and plenty of terrible ones were made by humans on autopilot or built from a template in an afternoon.
Slop is what you get when nobody made a decision. A tool, a template or a tired person produces the most likely version of a landing page, which is a kind of average of every landing page that came before. The defaults go out the door unedited, and the result feels like it belongs to everyone and no one.
The usual tells
Once you know what to look for, you cannot unsee it.
- A headline that could belong to anyone. "Streamline your workflow with our powerful platform" describes thousands of products.
- The glowing gradient hero. Soft blobs, a glass card or two, and a "badge" announcing something new.
- Exactly three feature cards. Icon, short title, one soft sentence. It is nearly always three.
- The vocabulary. Seamless, elevate, unlock, supercharge, game-changing, cutting-edge, next-generation.
- Faceless testimonials. No surname, no role, nothing specific about what changed.
- A "how it works" in three steps that never explains how anything works.
- Nothing only this business could say. No place, no person, no process, no opinion.
Why it costs you
Trust. Visitors decide quickly whether a page feels real. When it looks like a thousand others, many people assume the business behind it put in a similar amount of effort. First impressions are hard to undo.
Clarity. A vague page does not answer the questions a visitor actually has: what do you do, is it for me, what happens if I get in touch? If those answers are missing, the visitor leaves and goes back to search.
Search. Google has said it cares about whether content is helpful, not how it was produced. A page that says what every competitor says gives a search engine very little to tell it apart. The pages that tend to match real searches are specific ones: named services, real places, real processes and real answers.
How to fix it
1. Write the headline last, and make it specific
Here is a test. Paste a competitor's name into your headline. If it still works, rewrite it.
Compare "Streamline your workflow with our powerful platform" with "Book a Darwin fishing charter in two minutes, no phone calls." The second is an invented example, but notice what it does: it names a place, a task, a time and a benefit. You could not use it for any other business.
2. Say what you actually do, in plain words
Use ordinary nouns and verbs. Who is it for? What do they get? What happens after they click? If you cannot explain your service in two plain sentences, the page will not do it for you.
3. Use real proof, or none
Name your clients, with their permission. Use numbers you can stand behind. Show screenshots of real work and real photographs of real people. If you are new and have nothing yet, do not invent it. A page that honestly says what you do and how you work beats a wall of made-up praise, and it is easier to defend.
4. Make one or two deliberate design decisions
This is not a rule against gradients. It is a rule against not deciding. Choose a typeface and a colour for a reason that connects to the business. Use a real photo instead of a generic illustration. Leave white space on purpose. A page with two clear opinions feels designed. A page with none feels assembled.
5. Cut the filler
Read every sentence and ask whether it would still be true on a competitor's site. If it would, delete it or replace it with something specific. A shorter page with real content is stronger than a long one padded with adjectives.
6. Put people and place on the page
Who answers the email? Where are you based? What do you care about getting right? Those details are nearly impossible to fake, and they are what makes a small business feel like a small business and not a template.
7. Get the unglamorous basics right
Many slop pages fail at the boring things. They load slowly, break on phones, use low-contrast text, or have forms that screen readers cannot use. These problems quietly cost you visitors and enquiries. An independent pass over the page, covering accessibility, performance and SEO, tends to catch them before your customers do.
A five-minute test for your own page
Open your landing page and work through these:
- Cover the logo. Could this page belong to any business in your industry?
- Read the headline out loud. Would a person ever say that sentence?
- Count the filler words. Seamless, elevate, unlock, powerful, innovative. Each one is a place to be more specific.
- Try the ten-second test. Can a stranger tell what you do, who it is for and what to do next?
- Find something real. Is there at least one name, place, number or photo that nobody else could have written?
If you fail more than two of these, the page is probably costing you.
Using AI without producing slop
AI tools are useful for drafts, options and getting past a blank page. The trouble starts when the first draft becomes the final page.
Feed the tool real specifics, such as your customers' own words, your actual process and your honest opinions. Treat its output as raw material. Edit hard, and keep a human decision behind every headline and every claim. The aim is not to avoid the tool. It is to make sure that something real survives the process.
The page is an argument
A landing page is not a template to be filled in. It is a short argument for why a particular person should trust a particular business with a particular problem. Arguments need specifics.
If you want a site built around what makes your business different, that is what our web and software development work is about. And if you already have a page and want an honest outside opinion, independent testing and review is a good place to start.
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