AI Text Cleaner LogoAI Text Cleaner

About

Hi, I'm Gary Meehan

Gary Meehan, the founder and maintainer of AI Text Cleaner

I'm an AI engineer and founder based in Ireland, and I built AI Text Cleaner because I kept hitting the same problem while shipping AI-driven products: the text coming back from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini was full of invisible characters, smart quotes, and markdown leftovers that quietly broke everything downstream. On-site search wouldn't match. JSON parsers choked on curly quotes. Em-dashes flagged otherwise fine content as AI-generated. None of these were visible to the eye — but every one of them was a real bug.

Before this site, I spent years in the developer-tools and SEO space. I'm the author and maintainer of next-seo, a widely-used open-source SEO library for Next.js that powers production sites all over the web. Maintaining it for so long has given me a hands-on understanding of how search engines actually read pages — what they index, what they ignore, and which technical signals matter. That's the perspective I bring to everything I build.

My day-to-day work is now centered on AI agents and applied AI tooling — both for clients and through my own products. AI Text Cleaner is the small, public-facing piece of a much larger problem I work on: making AI output reliable enough to use in real production workflows.

How I built AI Text Cleaner

The first version was a fifty-line script I wrote for myself, after pasting a ChatGPT response into a CMS field and watching the on-site search fail to find a product I'd just written about. The culprit was a single zero-width space sitting between two letters of the product name. I fixed the data, but I also realised this was going to happen to everyone drafting content with AI — they just wouldn't know what to look for.

I turned the script into a web page so I could send it to colleagues. People kept asking for "one more toggle," so I broke each transform into its own checkbox, added a diff viewer to show exactly what changed before you copied, and made sure the whole thing ran in-browser. Nothing uploads, nothing logs, no account required. That's still the design today — and the reason I'm comfortable telling people to paste unpublished drafts, internal copy, or client work into it.

The site is open and maintained in public. If you find a bug, want a new transform, or have a use case it doesn't cover yet — get in touch. I read every email.

How to reach me

Prefer a single starting point? Use the contact page.

About AI Text Cleaner

AI Text Cleaner is a free online tool for removing hidden characters, markdown artifacts, and formatting issues from AI-generated text. Whether you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI assistant, the output often contains invisible characters, smart quotes, em dashes, and markdown leftovers that cause problems when pasting into documents, CMS editors, email clients, and code editors.

This tool solves that problem. Paste your AI text, click clean, and copy the result. Everything runs in your browser — no sign-up, no data collection, no server processing. It is the fastest way to clean AI text formatting before publishing, sharing, or using it in your workflow.

What it fixes

  • Hidden and invisible Unicode characters
  • Non-breaking spaces from AI copy/paste
  • Smart quotes and curly quotes converted to standard quotes
  • Em dashes and en dashes normalized to regular dashes
  • Ellipsis characters converted to three periods
  • Trailing whitespace at the end of lines
  • Markdown headings (##, ###) stripped for plain text
  • Asterisks used for bold/italic/bullet formatting removed

Who it's for

Content writers, marketers, developers, students, and anyone who copies text from AI tools into other applications. If you have ever pasted ChatGPT output into Google Docs, WordPress, Notion, or an email and noticed strange formatting, this tool is for you.

Frequently asked questions

Does AI Text Cleaner store or save any of my text?

No. All text processing happens entirely in your browser. Your text is never sent to our servers or any third party. Nothing you paste is stored, logged, or transmitted anywhere.

What usage data do you track?

We collect simple, anonymous statistics such as the number of characters cleaned and page views via Google Analytics. These counts help us understand general usage patterns. They cannot be linked to any individual user or to the content of any text.

Is AI Text Cleaner really free?

Yes, completely free with no sign-up required. The site is supported by ads. You can paste, clean, and copy as many times as you like.

Which AI tools does this work with?

AI Text Cleaner works with text from any AI tool including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Jasper, and others. It targets common formatting artifacts like hidden characters, smart quotes, markdown symbols, and non-standard spacing that most AI models produce.

Can I use this for non-AI text?

Absolutely. While the tool is optimized for AI-generated text, it works on any text with formatting issues. It is useful for cleaning text copied from PDFs, websites, emails, or any other source with unwanted formatting.

Try the tool

  • AI Text Cleaner — The full text cleaning tool with all options
  • Blog — Guides on cleaning ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini output

Last reviewed: June 2026