For years I’ve endured slides stuffed with synergy, optimised for strategic roadmaps that enhance processes, AI-driven innovation, and other magic formulas that always struck me as saying everything while meaning absolutely nothing.
Sound familiar?
The thing is, corporate waffle doesn’t just live in LinkedIn posts. It colonises company emails, sales presentations, internal documents, press releases — and increasingly, text generated by artificial intelligence.
I’d had enough. So, taking advantage of a couple of days off (which I’m blissfully spending in Brașov, Romania), I decided to launch on my malicious little blog the Official Bullshit Meter.
What Is the Bullshit Meter?
It’s a simple, free, and brutally honest tool. It analyses a piece of text and measures how saturated it is with buzzwords, corporate language, and vague concepts that hover somewhere between management-speak and pure nonsense — constructions that, if you skim them carelessly, sound intelligent, but are in reality as hollow as a will-o’-the-wisp on All Souls’ Day.
Using it couldn’t be simpler: paste in up to 3,000 characters and the system scans for dozens of bullshit signals, returning a score from 0 to 100% along with a detailed diagnosis of which patterns were found, how severe they are, and why the text risks coming across as artificial, generic, or simply empty.
An Important Caveat
No, the Bullshit Meter does not definitively determine whether a text was written by a human or an AI — though it does offer a rough assessment. No serious tool can do that with certainty, in my view.
What it looks for instead are the signals that make communication unconvincing, vague, or excessively manufactured. And yes, a human can score extremely high if they write like an automated corporate slogan generator.
The Most Entertaining Discovery
The best part is that I’ve already run it on the LinkedIn posts of a few of your colleagues — people who are enormously famous, widely cited, and deeply respected — and found them so thoroughly stuffed with waffle that if word got out, they’d be sent to pick daisies on the spot.
Want to know who they are? I’m not telling.
But you can use the detector and try to figure it out yourself: https://malvag.io/fuffometro/
If you know someone who writes things like “we enable synergistic ecosystems to accelerate the data-driven transformation of the business”, share this post with them. They may need saving.