5 Ways to Scan for AI Content on Your Website

Trying to identify if your website has seen a drop in Google search traffic due to the presence of AI spam in your content? Searching for a way to ensure the content your team is producing is authentic?

Scanning for AI content on your website is crucial to maintaining authenticity and trust in your brand, but it can be a little tricky if you don’t know how to do so.

To solve that issue, here are five ways to scan for AI content on your website.

Short on Time? Here Are the Key Takeaways

Here are five ways you can scan for AI content:

1. Use an AI website scanner: The best way to scan an entire website for AI content.
2. Use AI content detection software: The most effective way of checking if content is AI-generated.
3. Perform a manual review: Conduct a manual review, assessing web pages and keeping a keen eye out for any tell-tale signs of AI content.
4. Get a second opinion: If you think something is AI-generated, ask for a second opinion. 
5. Use generative AI tools: You can prompt a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Gemini to see if it recognizes content generated by a different AI writer. However, this method can lead to false positives and produce inconsistent results.

Why Scan for AI Content on Your Website?

Before we jump into the different ways to scan for AI content on your website, let's identify reasons why it’s important to audit AI content on a website.

Whether you are using AI to help you structure content (such as by creating a content brief) or you’re worried about the legitimacy of work, scanning for AI content is a great way to get peace of mind over whether or not Google considers your content AI-generated.

Why is that important? Well, Google has shown in recent algorithm updates that it penalizes websites that mass-produce AI content. Therefore, overreliance on AI-generated content could lead to your website getting down-ranked and losing organic traffic in the process.

5 Ways to Scan for AI Content on Your Website

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why understanding how much AI content is on your website is absolutely crucial for Google rankings. 

Here are five ways to scan for AI content on your website.

1. Use an AI website scanner

The best possible way to scan for AI content on your website is via an AI website scanner. This works similarly to AI content detection but streamlines the process of scanning entire websites. It’s effective and it makes the process quicker.

The Originality.ai AI Website Scanner, for example, allows you to scan your entire website in 1 click. To see a step-by-step guide on how to use the scanner, check out this website scan tutorial. 

• Receive a detailed report.
• Identify which pages are getting flagged as AI-generated.
• Narrow down AI content for review.

This quick, detailed way to scan for AI content is by far the most effective, making it the best option for scanning websites for AI content.

2. Use AI content detection software

Another fantastic way to scan for AI content is via an AI content detection tool. The Originality.ai AI Detector, for example, allows you to paste content from a URL, file, or text, providing plenty of options.

So, for example, if we prompt ChatGPT-4o-mini to generate some content:

Then, next, we copy and paste that content into the Originality.ai Content Scanner (2.0.1 Standard model) — the Content Scanner identifies that the content is AI-generated.

Interested in learning more about AI detection? Read our guide on AI detection accuracy and a meta-analysis of third-party AI detection studies.

3. Perform a manual review

Another option for assessing whether a website contains AI content is to conduct a manual review, assessing web pages and keeping a keen eye out for any tell-tale signs of AI-generated content. 

Some of the most common signs of AI-generated content include:

• Repetitive phrasing: Frequent repetition of similar words or phrases.
• Inconsistent tone: Shifts in tone or style within the same piece.
• Generic language: Overly broad or vague language lacking specificity.
• Lack of depth: Surface-level coverage of topics with minimal insight.
• Perfect grammar: Impeccable grammar and punctuation, but unnatural flow.

However, this is by no means an exact science. After all, everything you are publishing should have as close to perfect grammar as possible! 

Not to mention the fact that generative AI tools continue to improve, making it more and more difficult to spot with the naked eye — several studies have found that humans struggle to identify AI content.

So, while this is an option, for better efficacy, use AI detection tools.

4. Get a second opinion

If you do think something seems like it’s AI-generated, another great way to help identify AI-generated content is to ask for a second opinion from one of your colleagues. However, as with the previous option in this list (performing a manual review), getting a second opinion is not an exact science. 

5. Use generative AI tools

Another way to check for content created by AI is to actually run it back through generative AI tools (note: this provides inconsistent results and can lead to false positives).

For example, we could take an article created in Google Gemini and ask ChatGPT if it detects the content as AI-generated.

However, although it’s an option, checking content in this manner is likely to lead to the most false-positive results. False positives occur if human-written content is identified as AI.

Additionally, this method also lacks an AI score. So, there’s no way to check how confident the tool is that it’s actually identified the AI content correctly.

Final Thoughts

While there are five popular ways to scan for AI — they aren’t all equally effective. Manual reviews, second opinions, and using generative AI tools to check for AI content aren’t as reliable. To truly understand whether your website is getting flagged as AI-generated, check out the Originality.ai AI Website Scanner.