The Hidden Truth: URL Parameters Reveal AI-Generated Content

By Kaitlin Jarvis

The age of AI content creation has reached its tipping point. Scroll through LinkedIn, and you’ll find post after post on telltale signs of AI-generated content: the overuse of emoticons, em-dashes galore, and those polished phrases that seem to pop up everywhere. 

As a content creator and managing director of a leading automotive content agency, I’ve had my eye on ways to identify AI-generated content. It’s only a matter of time before a contributor takes advantage of the system, and a bad apple can spoil the whole bunch… 

I recently came across a piece of content that set off my internal alarms. The structure seemed suspiciously similar to the kind of outline I'd seen AI generate before. So, I ran it through GPTZero, a tool that supposedly detects AI-generated text. The result? It said the probability the piece was written by a human was 99%.

I wasn’t convinced. The thing is: humans have a sixth sense for authenticity, and this piece of content was anything but. 

Instead of accepting the detector’s verdict, I dug deeper. Each statistic had a citation, and the sources, research studies from reputable websites, were seemingly legitimate. 

Then I clicked on the actual links. And I saw it at the top of my web browser: buried in the URL was a small but revealing detail: utm_source=chatgpt.com.

There it was. A digital footprint that even an AI detector couldn’t catch. 

Why This Matters

ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into something more sophisticated than a writing tool or assistant. They now rival search engines like Google. In fact, Google is competing with itself in AI Overviews. And like Google, GPTs want websites to know where their traffic originates. 

Whether you’re using AI purely to shortcut research that would otherwise take hours or generate content directly, digital breadcrumbs are everywhere. These UTM parameters don’t disappear when you copy and paste sources into your final content, so the truth behind your content and research might be hiding in plain sight.