Hey HN! We’re Vincent and Jochen from Sitefire (https://sitefire.ai). We have been working together for years, with backgrounds in RL/optimization at Stanford and software engineering from Technical University Munich (TUM).With Sitefire (YC W26), we help marketing teams get recommended by AI Search (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Claude, etc.). Our software monitors prompts, sees which web pages get cited, and uses these insights to help marketing teams take action, e.g. create YouTube videos or write the right blog posts.This means we have a commercial stake in AI-generated web content.

And for now, high-information, AI-generated content works great to get cited and recommended in AI Search.But after talking to hundreds of marketing teams, it became clear that everyone despises AI-generated content (“AI slop”). And yet, everyone still wants to leverage AI to create content. So we asked ourselves: what characterizes AI slop? Can we train a model to identify it from human-generated web pages?Researchers from the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind already asked this question for fiction. Their paper StoryScope (Russell et al., 2026) showed that you…