I've been building SiteTell, it's a tool that scans your website and tells you what reads as AI generic. I've been focused on marketing it recently and my latest piece is a Chrome extension, also called SiteTell. I built it because quickly checking pages to see if they read as AI generic is really useful for me (my tone is writing comes across as very direct at points so it's good to check) but I also built it to see whether a Chrome extension can be a good distribution channel for a small SaaS. I finally got it live after a few days of figuring out how to not dox my address as a trader haha and it's been live since sometime this morning. You open a page and it will read through it and highlight sentences, and writing structures that read as AI generic. So vocab words like 'seamless', 'in today's fast paced world' etc... It also looks at writing structure for generic tells such as 'It's not X, it's Y' and paragraph and sentence length as AI tends to structure things uniformly and once you notice it's hard to unsee it. This is an extension of my SaaS (also called SiteTell) which does similar but for a whole site not an individual page like the extension. I wanted to make it really clear and transparent in the extension about what is flagged. It gets flagged against a curated ruleset, not through AI or anything like that, so that a page will have a consistent result no matter how many times it's scanned. So in this there's full transparency, you can see what rules were hit, what sections fired off and you can take a look and see whether you agree or if it's a false-positive, which sometimes it is. Eg: on a pricing page you're likely to see the word unlocked appear a lot so there will be false positives in that instance. This tool isn't used to 'call' people out either. Plenty of good copy is written with AI help. The problem is when that copy sounds generic, because readers notice and it costs you trust. So every flag is a specific sentence plus a specific reason, and you can decide for yourself whether you agree. The scanning, highlighting and the explanations are all free. Suggested rewrites are part of the paid SiteTell SaaS, but you don't need them to use it, especially if it's a small page with only a few issues. There are a lot of AI checkers on the chrome store, so how does mine differ? Most AI checkers make you paste text into a box. This works on the live page, so you see problems in context Explanations alongside a score, not just the score and having to trust the black box process behind the scenes It's tuned for marketing and landing page copy, not essays, so it's less likely to flag normal technical writing (not perfect though, see below) Nothing gets sent to me. There's no API call, no telemetry and no scan record anywhere. The only request it makes is to the site you're already on, and results live in session storage on your machine until you navigate away The biggest caveat for it is that it will sometimes flag things that are fine. If it flags something on your site that you think is legitimate, I'd like to hear about it, that feedback is how the rules get better and become more refined. For the more technical among you wanting to know, this is how it was built: It uses the web app's scoring and rule engine, so that way you'll always get the same results on both, but it is bundled into the extension, no calls are made, this makes it really quick. Manifest V3 with activeTab only, so no scary install warning. By default it scores the page the way my crawler sees it, so both always match, with a "Scored as displayed" mode for logged-in or JavaScript-heavy pages. Highlighting via the CSS Custom Highlight API. Flagged spans are located with a TreeWalker over a whitespace-normalised index of the page's text nodes, then painted as Range objects. Tested against real Chrome, not mocks. Puppeteer installs the built extension, clicks the toolbar action for a genuine activeTab grant, and compares the popup's score to the same URL parsed with jsdom, which is how the server-side crawler sees it. Feel free to check it out here: SiteTell: AI Writing Checker for Web Pages, I'd be curious to see what gets flagged on your pages and anything you think may be a false positive. I'd also like to know if anyone else has tried using an extension for distribution and how it went for you?   submitted by   /u/NotGeorge1 [link]   [comments]