Cover letter cliché checker
Does your cover letter sound like everyone else's? Paste it below and see the exact phrases a recruiter has already read a hundred times this week, and the patterns that make writing look machine-made.
Short answer: this is not an AI detector. It finds stock phrasing and quotes the exact words, so nothing here is a guess about who wrote your letter.
Checked in your browser as you type. Nothing is uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and no AI is involved in the check.
Why “sounds like AI” is the wrong worry
Very few employers run detection software on cover letters, and the tools that claim to do it are unreliable enough that acting on them would be reckless. So the risk is not being caught. The risk is being recognised.
A recruiter reads the same opening line thirty times a day. “I am writing to apply.” “I am excited about the opportunity.” “Proven track record.” Long before anyone wonders whether a machine wrote it, the letter has already been sorted into the pile of letters that could have been sent to anyone. That sorting happens in seconds, and it is what this tool measures.
The useful reframe: the problem was never that the words came from a model. It is that the words are not about this employer, this role, or anything you specifically did. A letter can be written entirely by AI and still be sharp, if it is grounded in real detail. A letter can be written entirely by hand and still be stock.
What it actually looks for
- Stock phrases. Around forty patterns grouped by where they usually appear: openings, enthusiasm filler, self-descriptions with nothing behind them, generic praise for the employer, and predictable closings.
- Nothing checkable. A letter with no numbers, dates or quantities anywhere gives the reader no way to size any claim in it.
- Uniform rhythm. People write in bursts, a long sentence then a short one. Sentences all the same length is the texture of generated prose, and it reads as flat even to someone who cannot say why.
- The swap test. If the body names nobody and nothing specific, the letter would survive being sent to a different company unchanged. That is the fault recruiters spot fastest.
It runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. Once the page has loaded you could disconnect from the internet and it would keep working, which is the only honest way to promise that a cover letter is not being collected.
We hold our own writer to this list
Job Badger generates cover letters, so a tool of ours that flags generic AI writing has to survive being pointed at our own output. The phrases above are banned in our letter-writing rules, a test fails the build if the tool and the rules drift apart, and you can check generated drafts here before sending. Paste a job posting and check for yourself →
Common questions
- Is this an AI detector?
- No, and deliberately so. AI detectors guess, and they are wrong often enough to accuse people who wrote every word themselves, which is a serious thing to do to someone applying for a job. This checks something verifiable instead: whether your letter is built from phrases that appear in everyone else's, and whether it contains anything specific enough to be worth reading. Every result quotes the exact words that triggered it, so you can judge for yourself.
- Does it matter if my letter sounds AI-written?
- It matters less than what people fear, and more than they realise. Almost no employer runs detection on cover letters. But recruiters read hundreds of applications and recognise the pattern instantly, and a letter that reads as generated gets the attention a generated letter deserves. The real cost is not being caught, it is being skipped.
- What is a good slop score?
- Under 20 is clean. Between 20 and 45 usually means two or three habits worth dropping, which takes a minute. Above 70 the letter is mostly assembled from parts, and rewriting it around one specific thing you did will do more than editing individual phrases.
- Why does it flag em dashes?
- Only at density, and it is not a punctuation rule. Generated drafts lean on the em dash as an all-purpose connector, so several of them in a short letter is a pattern readers have started to notice. One or two are fine and the checker ignores them.
- Can I just delete the flagged phrases?
- Usually the sentence gets better with the phrase simply removed, so start there. But if deleting leaves nothing behind, the phrase was carrying the sentence, and that sentence needed a fact rather than a rewrite.
- Does Job Badger's own writer pass this check?
- It is held to the same list. The phrases this tool flags are forbidden in our letter-writing rules, and a test in the codebase fails the build if the two ever drift apart. Generated drafts can still contain stock wording; run the checker and review the result.
Keep going
- Cover letter length checker — is it the length that gets read?
- How to write a cover letter that actually gets read — the one-argument method behind these rules.
- How long should a cover letter be? — and what to cut first.
Built by Nenad Franjic. The guidance here is tested against real applications and their outcomes — including the rejections — rather than written from a content brief.