Grammarly's new tool lets you prove you didn't use AI

Proving that you actually wrote your own work has quietly become one of the most frustrating problems of the AI era. You spend days writing an essay or a report, only for an unreliable AI detector to flag your hard work as synthetic garbage.

Grammarly is rolling out a clever way to kill that headache once and for all. Instead of guessing whether a finished piece of text looks like AI, its new Track Your Work feature inside Grammarly Authorship simply records your writing activity in real time.

It is completely free to use with any Grammarly account, but it comes with a few specific rules.

A flight recorder for your keyboard

Most AI detectors try to act like fortune tellers, scanning completed drafts and guessing probabilities. Grammarly flipped the script by essentially turning your document into a flight recorder.

The feature automatically tracks your writing process and categorizes the origin of the text as you go. It knows whether words were typed out keystroke by keystroke or dropped in via copy and paste.

In testing, copying and pasting a full article into an enabled document triggered an immediate report marking the content as completely copied. Deleting that pasted block and typing fresh sentences by hand resulted in a clean report confirming the words were original and newly typed.

Once you finish drafting, you can hit the Share Report button to toggle on a public link. You can send that URL straight to a skeptical teacher, client, or editor to verify that the piece came directly from your brain and keyboard.

The catches you need to know

Before you start relying on it, there are two major guardrails to keep in mind. First, Track Your Work only functions on brand-new, blank documents. If you open a file that is already finished or halfway written, you cannot turn it on, because Grammarly cannot verify what happened before the switch was flipped.

Second, it currently only lives inside web browsers. You can use it in browser-based Google Docs or Word Online, but it will not track anything if you are working inside the desktop version of Microsoft Office.

Getting it running is straightforward. Open a fresh web document, locate the fingerprint icon sitting at the bottom left, click it, and flip the toggle to on.

Why it matters

We think this is a brilliant pivot away from the broken market of AI detection software. Post-hoc AI detectors are notoriously inaccurate, routinely falsely accusing students and professional writers of cheating based on vague statistical patterns. Grammarly bypassed the guessing game entirely by providing verifiable process evidence instead of probabilistic scores.

For students, freelancers, and workplace writers, this is worth adopting immediately. Turning on a toggle at the start of a draft is a painless step that gives you ironclad proof against accusations before they even start.

That said, it is not completely bulletproof. If a student simply looks at an AI prompt on a secondary screen and manually types out the generated text word for word, the tool will still register that text as fresh typing. The browser-only requirement is also a nuisance for anyone married to local desktop writing environments. Still, shifting the defense from speculative algorithms to genuine activity logs is the smartest move we have seen in this space yet.