State of Images in AI-Generated Landing Pages (2026)

16,500+ live GitHub files still hotlink a dead Unsplash endpoint. Public AI-coded landing pages ship picsum.photos and placehold.co in production. Here's the data, the named repos, and the two-minute fix.

Published 2026-04-22 · Data: GitHub code-search API + a public scanner for live landing pages

TL;DR

→ 16,547 files on public GitHub still reference source.unsplash.com/random — an endpoint Unsplash retired in mid-2024. It returns HTTP 503. Every page that ships one of these URLs shows a broken-image icon in production.
→ The AI-website-builder platforms (v0, Bolt, Lovable, Onlook, Tempo, Magicpath, Trickle, Polymet) polish their own marketing sites cleanly — scans of their landing pages find zero placeholders or broken image patterns. The problem is downstream, in the sites their users generate.
→ Spot-check of a real AI-coded product launch (YouDeserveNow, 2026) found 234 unique picsum.photos URLs shipping to production — random photos that don't match the surrounding content.
→ The fix is one agent-runnable CLI call, or one HTTPS fetch at render time. Both zero-config. See below.

The broken URL that will not die

Unsplash deprecated source.unsplash.com/random in mid-2024. No official replacement. The endpoint has been returning 503 Service Unavailable for over a year, and Unsplash has confirmed it is never coming back.

An authenticated GitHub code-search today returns:

Language	File hits
JavaScript	7,856
HTML	6,016
TypeScript	1,444
Vue	1,012
Svelte	114
Astro	105
Total	≈ 16,547

Repo-deduped to ~885 unique public repositories after filtering to stars ≥ 5, non-archived, issues enabled, and pushed in the last 12 months. The full research note lists 13 well-known OSS projects currently shipping <img> tags that 503 in production, including nuxt/website-v2 (2,252★), guocaoyi/create-chrome-ext (2,116★), and debridmediamanager/debrid-media-manager (1,266★ — PR merged April 2026).

Why didn't CI catch this? Because a <img src="..."> that 503s still loads. It just loads nothing. HTML lints don't flag dead external URLs; deploy previews don't block on missing images; humans reviewing AI-coded PRs skip past the "standard" image tile. The URL was correct the day it was generated — and Unsplash's deprecation happened silently from the perspective of anyone who wasn't reading their blog.

It's now also an AI-coding-agent problem

AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, v0, Bolt, Lovable) were trained on GitHub circa 2023-2024 — back when source.unsplash.com/random/1200x800 was the canonical "random image" snippet. It appeared in thousands of starter kits, tutorials, and boilerplates. When asked to build a landing page today, the agent emits exactly that dead URL because it's what the training data said was the right answer.

The user reviews the PR, approves it (the image tile looks plausible in local dev because the cached image hasn't flushed), deploys, and ships a site with gray broken-image icons where every photo should be.

AI website-builder platforms vs their output

We scanned the public landing pages of eight AI-website-builder platforms (2026-04-22, via our public scanner):

Platform	source.unsplash/random	placehold.co family	picsum.photos
v0.dev	0	0	0
bolt.new	0	0	0
lovable.dev	0	0	0
onlook.com	0	0	0
tempo.new	0	0	0
magicpath.ai	0	0	0

The platforms are clean. Their users' output is not. A spot-check of youdeservenow.com — a real AI-coded product launch — returned 234 unique picsum.photos URLs, each producing a random photo unrelated to the surrounding content. This is the characteristic signature of an agent that was told "put a nice image here" and defaulted to the easiest URL it could remember.

The two-minute fix

Two fixes solve this at different scales:

1. If you're a human maintainer

grep -RIn "source.unsplash.com/random" .

If you get a hit, every user of your repo is looking at a broken image tile right now. Replace the dead URL with either a pinned Unsplash URL (images.unsplash.com/photo-<id>?w=1200&h=800&fit=crop), a self-hosted JPG, or — for AI-coding workflows — a tteg save call that writes a real photo into the repo.

2. If you're an AI coding agent (or you work with one)

Give the agent a deterministic recipe for "image here" instead of "put a nice image":

uv tool install tteg
tteg save "startup office" ./public/hero --orientation landscape
# saves ./public/hero.jpg — a real Unsplash photo

Or at render time, no install needed:

curl "https://tteg-api-53227342417.asia-south1.run.app/search?q=coffee+shop&n=1"
# returns { image_url, width, height, author, attribution, ... }

No API key. No Unsplash developer account. No .env. CORS enabled. Free tier: 50 queries/day per IP.

3. Verify before commit

Paste any preview URL into the public scanner:

https://tteg.kushalsm.com/scan?url=<your-preview-url>

The scanner reports every unique placeholder / broken / random image URL on the page, with a one-line fix per pattern. No login, no account.

Method

GitHub code-search. Authenticated queries against /search/code filtered by language, paginated to 1000 results per language, repo-deduped, filtered to repos with ≥ 5 stars, non-archived, issues enabled, pushed in the last 12 months. Full protocol and the counting script in RESEARCH.md § Reproducing the search.
Landing-page scan. Client-side regex sweep over HTML fetched through a server-side Cloudflare Pages Function (tteg.kushalsm.com/api/fetch) that strips CORS. Six pattern families: source.unsplash.com/random, placehold.co, via.placeholder.com, dummyimage.com, picsum.photos, loremflickr.com.

Citation

If this data helps something you're writing, please link rather than copying — the underlying GitHub numbers drift week-to-week as repos get fixed or forked.

Kushal SM. "State of Images in AI-Generated Landing Pages (2026)."
https://tteg.kushalsm.com/state-of-ai-landing-page-images-2026.html (2026-04-22)

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