AI detector for essays: check the draft before you submit it

Paste your essay into the checker on this page and you get a score from 0 to 100 plus one of three readings: Reads as AI-generated, Borderline, or Reads as human-written. It takes seconds and needs 65 words or more. It is free, and there is no account, no card and nothing to verify. The score is a reading of how your writing looks on the surface. It is not evidence of who wrote the essay, because no detector anywhere can produce that.

Try an example:
113 words
This run costs 1 · 10 of 10 free credits left today

Check it before you submit, not after

The order matters more than the tool does. Before you submit, a high reading is a note about your draft and you can act on it in ten minutes. After you submit, the same reading arrives as somebody else's number attached to your name, and you are answering a question rather than editing a paragraph.

The loop is short. Finish the draft. Paste the whole thing and check it. Read the sentences the report points at. Change the ones you agree with. Check again.

A check costs one credit whatever the length, and the free allowance is 10 credits a day per network, so that is ten runs a day even on a long essay. The allowance refills 24 hours later.

  • Check the finished draft rather than an outline. The reading describes the sentences you will actually hand in.
  • Check the whole essay first, then re-check the section that looked worst on its own.
  • Read the highlighted sentences before you change anything, and start with the ones you agree with.
  • Check again after editing. Fixing one paragraph leaves the rest of the essay exactly as it was.

What the score means, and what it does not

Higher means the text reads more like machine-written text. Reads as human-written means the patterns these systems score are not present. Reads as AI-generated means they are. Borderline means the reading is genuinely unresolved, and the honest way to treat it is as neither result rather than as a pass.

What the number describes is style: how predictable your sentences are, how little their lengths vary, how often stock phrasing turns up. Text carries no record of its own authorship, so nothing inside a document can report who typed it. That limit applies to every detector, including this one.

It is also not a forecast of the number your school's software will show. That is a different model, with thresholds somebody local chose, retrained on its own schedule. Read this as a reading of your draft, and expect another tool to land somewhere else.

Human writing gets flagged, and not at random. Stanford HAI researchers (Liang et al., 2023) ran TOEFL essays written by non-native English speakers through seven detectors, and 61% came back falsely flagged as AI-generated. Every one of those essays had a human author.

How much of the essay to paste

Paste the whole essay if it fits. One run takes 12,000 characters, which is roughly 2,000 words, and most single assignments land under that. The floor is 65 words, because a reading taken from less text than that does not mean much.

Above 2,000 words, split at your own section breaks rather than mid-argument and check the parts one after another. Since a check costs one credit at any length, a 5,000-word chapter is three runs and three credits out of the ten free ones.

Paste your prose. A long block quote is somebody else's sentences and gets scored like any other text, and a reference list is not prose at all. Leaving both out gives you a cleaner reading of the writing you are actually responsible for.

  • Under 65 words: too short to check. Include the paragraphs around it.
  • Between 65 and 2,000 words: one run, one credit.
  • Over 2,000 words: split at your headings, one run per part.
  • Leave out the cover page, the reference list and long quoted passages.

What actually gets an essay flagged

The patterns are specific, and most of them are habits school taught you. The opener that announces a topic is important without saying anything about it. The pivot that manufactures a contrast the sentence never needed, as in "not just a tool, but a transformation". The tidy three-item list where two items would have done. The conclusion that opens by declaring something is clear. Hedges stacked two and three deep, as in "it could be argued that this may potentially suggest".

Rhythm counts as much as vocabulary. A paragraph in which every sentence lands within a word or two of the same length reads machine-made to these systems whoever wrote it, because real drafting is uneven. People write a long sentence, then a short one, then a clause they meant to cut and kept.

The registry of named tells runs in your browser, free and with no limit, and it highlights the exact phrase instead of scoring the document. That is the part that tells you what to change. Swapping a single word for a synonym rarely moves the reading, because what the score responds to is the shape of the sentence rather than the vocabulary sitting in it.

Rewriting the parts that carry the score

Rewrite paragraphs, not whole essays. The humanizer rewrites every sentence you give it in one click, 12,000 characters or about 2,000 words per run, priced by length at one credit per 50 words, with a floor of 25 words. The free allowance covers around 500 words of rewriting a day, which is enough for the sections a check points at.

Working that way is better editing anyway. Send the whole essay through and the sentences you were proud of come back changed as well. Send the paragraphs that scored worst and the writing that already worked stays yours. Then check the rewritten version, so the reading you act on is the one for the text you are submitting.

On permission, briefly. If you were allowed to generate a draft, editing it is ordinary editing. If AI was not permitted for the assignment, that rule covers the draft however it is edited afterwards. The policy that binds you is the one in your course handbook, so read that rather than a general rule from any website.

If you wrote it yourself and it comes back flagged

Do not start rewriting in a panic. Run the tell registry over the same text first and look at what fired. If the highlights cluster in one or two paragraphs, you have an ordinary editing job in front of you. If almost nothing fires and the score stays high, the cause is usually plain, orderly, formal prose, which is a description of how you write rather than a fault in it.

This lands hard on writers working in a second language, which is what the Stanford TOEFL result above describes, and on anyone who writes to a template because school handed them one. Rewriting your register to please a classifier is a poor trade when the alternative is showing how the essay was made.

A record helps more than editing does. Draft in something that keeps version history, such as Google Docs or Word, and keep your outlines and earlier files where they are. Copying the text into a fresh file leaves that history behind. The proof-of-human-writing tool exports a signed record of your own drafting, and the verify page checks the signature on one.

  • Run the checker and the tell registry on the same text and compare what each one points at.
  • Fix the paragraph that carries the score and leave the rest of your voice alone.
  • Keep the document history. It is the strongest thing an ordinary writer has.
  • If an accusation has already been made, take the questions to ask from the falsely accused page before you reply.
Questions people actually ask

AI detector for essays: check the draft before you submit it: common questions

Is this AI detector free for essays?

Yes. Ten credits a day per network, and a check costs one credit whatever the essay's length, so that is ten essay checks a day. No account, no card, no email address, nothing to verify. The registry of AI writing tells, the proofreader, the word counter, the readability check and the originality check are free with no limit at all.

What AI score is safe to submit?

No one can give you that number honestly. A threshold is chosen by whoever runs the software, not by the text. Read the label rather than the digits: human-written means the patterns are absent, borderline means the reading is unresolved, AI-generated means the phrasing is worth fixing before you hand the essay in.

Will my university's detector give the same result?

Not necessarily. It is a different model with its own thresholds, retrained on its own schedule, and detectors can disagree about the same paragraph. This checker tells you how your draft reads on the features these systems respond to. It cannot tell you what another product will output.

How long an essay can I check at once?

12,000 characters per run, roughly 2,000 words, with a floor of 65 words. A longer essay goes through in sections, split at your own headings. The cost is one credit per run either way, so a long passage does not spend your allowance faster than a short one.

Does a high score mean I will be accused of cheating?

No. It means your text carries the surface features these systems score, and human writing carries them too. The Stanford TOEFL finding above is the clearest published evidence of that. Treat a high score as a reason to look at specific sentences, not as a verdict on you or your work.

I used AI for the first draft. Does rewriting it make the essay mine?

That is a policy question rather than a technical one. Where you were permitted to generate a draft, editing it is ordinary editing. Where AI was not permitted, the rule covers the draft whatever happens to it afterwards. Check the handbook for your course, since these rules differ between departments inside the same university.

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