Can Customers Tell If My Content Is Written By AI?

Nobody is checking.

Can customers tell if my content is written by AI? You’ve read your own page back a few times, and it still doesn’t feel right. You’re probably the only one that’s noticed. The research says customers can’t tell, the detectors can’t, and Google has said since 2023 that it doesn’t mind. Which leaves the harder question.

Can customers tell if my content is written by AI? No, that’s the problem.

In 2023, Cornell and Stanford researchers gave 4,600 people 7,600 profiles and asked which ones an AI had written. They scored 50 to 52%. A coin does the same. Paying them a bonus to concentrate changed nothing, and the AI behind it was older and clumsier than anything on our phones now.

Why they failed is the useful part. People read contractions as a human fingerprint, and the AI used more of them than the humans did. Family words and first-person pronouns read as human too, and meant nothing. So the researchers trained a model on what people fall for, and used it to pick AI profiles. Those scored 65.7% human. The real ones scored 51.7%.

So nobody has rumbled you. That’s the comfortable answer, and it isn’t the one you came for.

We’re Sokada, a family-run web design and marketing agency in Heathfield. We build websites for businesses across East Sussex and Kent, and we write the content that goes on them. We read pages like yours all week. The ones that aren’t bringing in the work are hardly ever failing just because a machine helped write them.

You’re not losing enquiries because AI wrote the page. You’re losing them because the page doesn’t answer anyone.

How to tell if your content sounds like AI.

Read it out loud. That catches most of it on its own, because your ear notices what your eye skips.

Then look for the em dash (—). It got so tied to ChatGPT that OpenAI had ChatGPT write an apology for ruining it, then made it stop on request. It still uses them by default.

The vocabulary sticks around longer than the punctuation does. Andrew Gray, a librarian at UCL, went through millions of academic papers and found the spike the year ChatGPT arrived. Meticulously up 137%. Intricate up 117%. Commendable up 83%. Marketing has its own dialect on top of that, and AI has picked it up from us.

The words are the easy bit, though.

Four questions to ask your own page.

Is it chatty, or just tidy? Nobody talks the way most web pages read. Real conversation repeats itself, trails off, puts the important thing second. AI writes like it’s being marked.

Is it flat? It’ll tell you it’s excited and stick an emoji on the end. You feel the gap.

Does it talk at you, or to you? It never asks you anything, and it never leaves a gap because you’d obviously know the answer already.

Does it hold a voice? Read page one, then page nine. If they sound like two different people and neither sounds like you, that’s the expensive part. People remember a brand not a template.

The test that actually matters.

Nobody searches “can customers tell if my content is written by AI” because they want a punctuation lesson. They search it because they think the page isn’t working.

Find a single sentence on the page that only your business could have written. A price. A town. A job you finished. Something you’d say down the phone that a competitor couldn’t say straight back.

Can’t find one? Then you’ve got your answer, and it’s got nothing to do with AI. Whoever read that page wanted to know what you charge, how long the job takes, whether you’ve worked in their town, and what happens after they fill in your contact form. What they got was four paragraphs of confident, well-punctuated text that said nothing. So they left.

They spot the emptiness. AI just has no stake in fixing it, because it doesn’t know your prices and won’t be there if the job goes wrong.

Could a competitor paste your page onto their site, change the phone number, and get away with it?