Every few months I get sent a homepage to look at, and every few months I read the same sentence.
We deliver innovative digital solutions that unlock your potential.
It is never quite that sentence. It is always close enough that you could swap it with the last one and nobody would notice — including, and this is the sad part, the business it belongs to.
So I built a machine that finds it.
What it does
You paste your copy in. It reads the words against a list of phrases that have been used so often they have stopped meaning anything, marks every one it finds, and tells you how dirty the wash was.
That is the whole tool. There is no account, no export, no upsell.
The list is not a style opinion I invented on a Tuesday. It is the phrases I have actually had to remove from actual websites: seamless, cutting-edge, passionate about, leverage, bespoke solutions, take it to the next level. Forty-one of them at the moment. The list will grow, because the phrases keep arriving.
Why a score rather than a red cross
A count on its own is useless. Six clichés in eighty words is a crisis. Six in four thousand is a Tuesday.
So it scores density rather than volume, and gives you one of four verdicts. The worst one is biohazard, which is reserved for copy where nobody — including the person who wrote it — could tell you what the business does.
I have shown that verdict to a paying client. They laughed, and then they rewrote the page, and the rewrite was better.
What it will not do
It will not write your copy. It cannot: it has no idea what you do, and neither does your homepage, which is rather the point.
It will not tell you a clean page is a good page. You can write four hundred words of perfectly cliché-free nothing. The Laundry will pass it happily and you will still have said nothing.
And it does not send your words anywhere. It runs in your browser, the analysis happens on your machine, and nothing is stored, logged or seen by me. I mention that because the first question anyone sensibly asks about a box that wants their website's words is where do the words go.
The fix, when you find one
Replace each marked phrase with what you actually meant.
Not a better phrase. What you meant. If you cannot say what you meant, you have found something more useful than a copy problem.