There are certain words and phrases that scream “a robot wrote this.” Your audience might not be able to articulate exactly why something feels off, but they sense it.
And the more AI-generated content floods the internet, the more attuned people become to these tells.
Phrases like “delve into,” “it’s important to note,” and “in today’s digital age” have become so strongly associated with AI that using them in your content immediately undermines your credibility, even if the actual information is solid.
The frustrating part is that AI genuinely loves these phrases. Ask it to write about any topic and there’s a good chance it’ll “unlock” something, “delve into” something else, and finish by reminding you how everything is “seamless” and “robust.”
These words aren’t inherently bad, but AI uses them so frequently and in such predictable patterns that they’ve become the fingerprints of machine-generated text.
And your audience is starting to recognise those fingerprints.
These prompts will help you identify and replace the most common AI tells in your content. You’ll build a personal blocklist, teach AI to avoid these phrases proactively, and develop a cleanup routine that catches anything that slipped through. The result is content that sounds authentically human because it avoids the exact patterns people have learned to associate with artificial writing.
Before you can fix the problem, you need to know what you’re looking for.
AI tells aren’t just individual words, they’re patterns. It’s the way AI opens paragraphs, transitions between ideas, and wraps up sections.
Once you see these patterns, you’ll recognise them instantly in every AI-generated piece you read. And more importantly, you’ll be able to catch them in your own content before you hit publish.
Generate a comprehensive list of the most common AI writing tells, words, phrases, sentence patterns, and structural habits that make content obviously AI-generated.
Organise them into categories: overused words (like delve, leverage, streamline, utilise, robust, seamless, unlock, elevate, foster, landscape, moreover, furthermore), common opening patterns that AI defaults to, transition phrases that AI overuses, closing patterns and summary habits that feel formulaic, and structural tells like how AI organises paragraphs or sequences ideas. For each tell, explain why it’s a problem and provide 2-3 natural, human-sounding alternatives. This should be a reference guide I can use every time I review AI-generated content.
Save the output as a permanent reference document.
Every time you generate content with AI, scan it against this list before you publish. Over time, you’ll internalise the patterns and spot them without needing the reference.
But in the early days, having a checklist makes the difference between publishing something that reads as authentic and publishing something that your audience immediately pegs as AI-written.
The best defence against AI tells isn’t catching them after the fact.
It’s preventing them from appearing in the first place. You can do this by including a blocklist directly in your content prompts.
When you tell AI upfront which words and phrases to avoid, the output is cleaner from the start and requires less editing afterward. This is one of those simple adjustments that saves you significant time over hundreds of pieces of content.
Write [your content request] following all other instructions, and also observe this strict blocklist. Never use any of the following words or phrases: delve, utilise, streamline, leverage, robust, seamless, moreover, furthermore, in today’s [anything], at the end of the day, it’s worth noting, game-changer, it’s important to remember, unlock the power of, take it to the next level, navigate the world of, elevate your, deep dive into, foster, landscape, harness, empower, embark, resonate, cutting-edge, or any variation of these. If you catch yourself reaching for any of these, find a simpler, more natural way to say the same thing. Write like a person, not a language model.
You’ll want to customise this blocklist based on your own experience. As you edit AI content, you’ll notice specific words and phrases that keep showing up in your outputs. Add those to your personal blocklist.
After a month of doing this, you’ll have a refined list that’s perfectly calibrated to the specific AI tendencies that appear in your content. Think of it as training AI to avoid its own worst habits.
Individual word swaps help, but the deeper issue is AI’s structural patterns.
AI tends to organise ideas the same way every time: state a problem, explain why it matters, provide a solution, summarise.
That structure is fine for one piece of content, but when every piece follows the exact same structure, the repetition becomes an AI tell in itself. Your audience won’t notice it consciously, but they’ll feel the sameness and start losing interest.
Rewrite the following AI-generated content with a completely different structural approach: [paste your draft]. Don’t follow the standard AI pattern of problem-explanation-solution-summary. Instead, choose one of these alternative structures and apply it: start with a specific scenario or micro-story, then extract the lesson; open with the counterintuitive insight first, then explain why the common assumption is wrong; present it as a series of observations that build on each other toward a bigger conclusion; or start with the action step and then explain the reasoning behind it. Maintain all the original information but completely restructure how it’s delivered. The result should feel unpredictable to the reader.
Structural variety is one of the most overlooked aspects of content quality. When every post, email, and article follows the same arc, your content starts to blend together in your audience’s mind.
But when each piece has a different structure, every one feels fresh and distinct. Readers don’t know why your content feels more interesting than others in your niche, they just know they enjoy reading it. And that enjoyment comes from structural unpredictability as much as from the information itself.
Even with blocklists and structural rewrites, some AI patterns will occasionally slip through.
That’s normal. The final step is always a human-eye scan where you read the content specifically looking for anything that feels off.
Not for grammar or accuracy, but for the “does this sound like a person” test. If any sentence or phrase makes you pause and think “a person wouldn’t say it this way,” change it.
Perform a final AI-detection scan on the following content: [paste your final draft]. Read through it line by line and flag any remaining AI tells. Look for: phrases that sound like they came from a corporate style guide, any remaining words from common AI blocklists, transitions that feel mechanical rather than natural, sentences that are technically correct but feel hollow or impersonal, any place where the content sounds like it’s explaining something to nobody in particular rather than talking to a specific reader, and paragraphs that feel like they were generated to fill space rather than to deliver value. For each flag, provide a human-sounding replacement. The goal is content that could pass as entirely human-written.
Running this final scan consistently builds your editing instincts. After a dozen rounds, you’ll start catching AI tells in your first read-through without needing the prompt. Your eye gets trained to spot the difference between writing that has a pulse and writing that technically checks all the boxes but feels empty.
That trained eye becomes one of your most valuable skills as someone who uses AI as a content tool, because it ensures that everything you publish maintains the human quality your audience expects and deserves.
AI tells aren’t going away.
As AI gets more sophisticated, the tells will get subtler. But the fundamental principle stays the same, if your content sounds like it was produced rather than written, your audience will notice.
Stay ahead of that curve by using these prompts to catch the patterns before your readers do, and your content will continue to stand out in a market that’s increasingly flooded with generic, machine-flavored output.
Pick one prompt from this guide, fill in your details and run it today. Small, steady changes add up fast.