Open your last AI draft. Read the first sentence out loud. These are the AI writing tells that give it away every time: if it starts with “Here’s the thing,” “In today’s world,” or “Let’s dive in” — you already know it’s AI before you read another word. Here’s the rest of the test.
In This Post
The clichéd opener
“Most people think X.” “The truth is Y.” “At the end of the day, Z.” These openers show up in AI drafts because they’re statistically the most common way to start a paragraph about anything — which is exactly why they read as generic the moment a human sees them.
The contrast tic
“It’s not about working harder. It’s about working smarter.” The rhythm feels punchy the first time. By the third paragraph that reuses it, it reads like a template, because it is one — a pattern the model reaches for whenever it needs to sound decisive without committing to a specific claim.
The repeated sentence start
Three sentences in a row that all open with “This” or “It” or the same subject. Anaphora is a real rhetorical device when a human uses it on purpose. An AI model uses it because it ran out of other ways to connect ideas, and the repetition reads as a stutter instead of a flourish.
The manufactured hype
Nothing is “revolutionary.” Nothing is “game-changing.” When every sentence reaches for the biggest available adjective, the reader stops believing any of them — the intensity cancels itself out.
The filler word
“Very,” “really,” “basically,” “simply.” None of these words add information. They’re there because the model is hedging, softening a claim it isn’t confident enough to state plainly. Cut them and the sentence gets stronger, not weaker.
Why these AI writing tells slip through in the first place
None of these patterns are wrong on their own — that’s what makes them hard to catch by eye. A clichéd opener is grammatically fine. A contrast tic is a real rhetorical move. The problem is frequency, not existence: one hedge word in a thousand-word post is invisible, five of them in one paragraph is a pattern, and patterns are what readers (and increasingly, AI-detection tools) actually notice.
That’s also why proofreading for tone doesn’t reliably catch them. You’re reading for meaning, and every one of these tells is grammatically and semantically fine — the tell is structural, not a typo. It takes a checklist, not a read-through, to catch a pattern you already expect to see.
This is the exact checklist we built into Versoo Content Ops
Every draft the plugin generates runs against this same list of rules before it reaches your editor — banned openers, the contrast tic, repeated sentence starts, manufactured hype, filler words, and a few more. Not as a suggestion buried in a prompt. As a fixed instruction applied to every draft, every time, with no setting to turn it off.
One draft, before and after
Same prompt, two outputs. Raw AI: “Here’s the thing about email marketing — it’s not about sending more. It’s about sending smarter! Really, consistency is everything.” Versoo Content Ops: “Email marketing doesn’t reward volume. It rewards a list that expects to hear from you — and opens because of it.” Same idea. One of them sounds like a person said it.
Try it yourself
Run your own last draft through the checklist above and count the hits. Then install Versoo Content Ops free from WordPress.org and see what a draft looks like when none of those tells make it through. The complete checklist, including the headline formulas the plugin uses for titles, is on the Editorial Checklist page. (Google’s own guidance on helpful content makes the same point from the ranking side: content written to sound distinctive to a reader outperforms content written to sound acceptable to everyone.)