Paste the draft. Get a 0-100 Authenticity Score in roughly thirty seconds, plus a sentence-level colour map that shows which lines read AI to an editor and which read in your reporting voice. Built for journalists, feature writers, magazine staff, and bylined columnists checking news pieces, features, opinion columns, and longform before the desk sees them. Editorial register, attribution preserved, no signup for the first scan.
In 2023 an article that read slightly AI was a stylistic concern. In 2026 it is a desk-rejection concern at most national outlets and a trust signal that the audience itself has learned to read. There are three overlapping risks for working writers; pre-file scoring addresses the prose-pattern layer of all three before the desk sees the draft.
Major outlets including the New York Times, Reuters, the Guardian, and the Associated Press updated their AI guidelines in 2024 and 2025. The current line is that AI assistance is acceptable for research and structural drafting but that the filed copy must read in the writer's voice. Editors are running AI-prose checks on flagged drafts and asking writers to rewrite formulaic passages. A pre-file score catches what the desk would catch and lets the writer fix it before the conversation happens.
Subscribers to a magazine or a columnist sense AI prose before they can name it. The unsubscribe is not triggered by a single piece; it is the slow drift across four or five articles that all read a little flatter than the writer's archive. The score is the early warning that the drift has started, and the highlights show which sentences are pulling the register toward the generic.
Aggregators and wire services run AI checks on submissions in 2026. A piece that scores low on a syndicate's internal check gets quietly dropped from the pickup queue, often without explanation back to the originating writer. Pre-file scoring catches the patterns that flag the submission so the piece clears the gate it would otherwise stall at.
This is the routine working journalists use before filing. For a 1,200-word piece, plan on 12 to 20 minutes start to finish. The point of sentence-level highlights is that you do not rewrite the whole article; you rewrite the lines that pull the score down.
Drop the full draft into the scoring panel. In about thirty seconds you get a 0-100 Authenticity Score plus a section-by-section breakdown. Save the baseline if it falls below your filing target so you can measure the delta after the rewrite. For pieces longer than 800 words on the free tier, paste the lead and nut graf first, then the middle, then the kicker; the per-section score is more useful than the overall number anyway.
Green lines passed every signal. Yellow lines tripped one or two and are usually acceptable on their own. Red lines tripped three or more and are the highest-leverage rewrites. The colour map matters more than the headline score; a 65 with four red sentences clusters in the lead is easier to fix than a 78 spread evenly across the middle.
Work the red sentences one at a time. Ask whether you would actually speak each line on a call with the editor. If not, rewrite it. Add a concrete detail from your reporting: a specific quote, a number from the document, an observation from the scene. These are the cues AI prose strips out. Replace formulaic transitions ("furthermore," "moreover," "in conclusion") with the natural connectives a reporter would actually use in narration.
Paste the revised draft back in. Target 80 for news and features, 85 for opinion columns and personal essays. Confirm every attribution and direct quote is still in position after the rewrite (AI-assisted edits sometimes drift attribution; verify manually). Then paste into the CMS or send to the desk as usual. The free Chrome extension also lets you re-scan inline against most newsroom CMSes for a final spot check before submission.
The bands below are calibrated against published editorial content across news, feature, opinion, and longform. Numbers shift slightly by format (wire copy runs a few points lower at the same craft level because the register is tighter) but the bands below are the working defaults to file by.
Reads as a working writer's voice. Editorial AI-checks see no meaningful patterns. Subscribers will read it the way they read your archive. This is the floor for opinion columns, bylined essays, and any piece where voice is the product. Senior columnists with established voices typically sit here on a clean first draft.
The standard band for working news and feature copy. Desk-side AI-prose checks pass on a first read. Aggregators pick up at this band without flagging. For opinion pieces or essays under your byline, push to 85 by editing the red sentences in the lead and the kicker, where AI patterns concentrate.
The band where a senior editor reads the draft, hesitates on two or three passages, and asks for a rewrite. The article may still run but with the writer asked to rework the flagged sections. Editorial AI-checks at major outlets flag pieces in this band for additional review. Fixing the red sentences before filing is usually faster than the back-and-forth after.
The band where the desk reads the piece, recognises it as either AI-assisted with light editing or written under heavy desk-style-guide pressure, and routes it back for a substantial rewrite. For bylined work, this is the band where the writer's editor starts asking whether the assignment was actually done. Restructure the lead and the kicker, then add three or four concrete reporting anchors throughout.
Almost certainly an unedited or lightly-edited ChatGPT draft. Editorial AI-checks flag this with high confidence. Filing at this score risks a formal conversation about sourcing and attribution, not a stylistic rewrite. The fix is to throw out the draft and rewrite from notes and source documents, not to paraphrase your way out. Paraphrased AI prose carries its own fingerprint that current classifiers flag aggressively.
ChatGPT writes editorial prose in a specific way that working editors learn to recognise on second read. The scorer flags each pattern below so the writer can pull them out before the desk sees the draft.
Editorial prose has a rhythm: short paragraph, longer paragraph, short paragraph for a punch, longer for context. AI defaults to even three-to-five sentence paragraphs throughout. The scorer flags monotony in paragraph length and rewards the kind of varied rhythm a working reporter naturally produces.
"In an era of," "as the world grapples with," "in today's rapidly evolving landscape." Stock lead constructions are the single highest-density AI-tell zone in editorial copy. The scorer flags the lead more aggressively than any other section and rewards leads that open on a specific person, scene, number, or observation.
"Furthermore," "moreover," "in addition," "it is worth noting that." Working writers use natural connectives or none at all (a hard scene break is fine). AI defaults to formal transitions on every paragraph junction. The scorer flags transition density and rewards prose that moves on the strength of the content rather than connective tissue.
"While some may argue that," "it could be said," "there are multiple perspectives on." AI hedges every claim because it has no stake. Editorial writing commits. The scorer rewards sentences that take a position and flags the kind of evenly-balanced framing that reads research-summary rather than reported.
"In conclusion," "to summarise," "as we look toward the future," "ultimately, the path forward demands." Kicker synthesis is the second-highest AI-tell zone after the lead. The scorer flags kickers that read like wrap-ups and rewards kickers that land on a quote, a specific image, or a forward-looking detail rather than a summary.
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The score is a proxy for the trust signals an editor and a subscriber read on the page. AI prose passes the surface but strips the small craft cues that signal a working reporter. The scorer flags where they are missing so you can restore them before filing.
"Experts say" reads AI. "Three staff at the Centre for Policy Research told me on Tuesday" reads reported. The scorer flags abstract claim sentences and rewards specific attribution: a name, a role, a place, a time. Even one specific attribution per section pulls a piece out of the risk band.
"The meeting was tense" reads AI. "The meeting ran twenty minutes over schedule, and the chair tapped his pen against the table when the third question landed" reads reported. The scorer rewards sentences that anchor in observable detail (numbers, gestures, time markers, physical specifics) over sentences that summarise sentiment.
AI prose removes caveats because they hurt the surface confidence of the writing. Working editorial prose includes them: a source who declined to comment, a number that does not reconcile, an open question the piece does not resolve. The scorer rewards these honesty signals and flags pieces that read suspiciously frictionless.
If your article scored low, here is the editorial AI rewriter tuned for news, feature, opinion, and longform copy.
Open AI rewriter →Sister page for personal blogs, newsletters, and SEO content with bands tuned to the helpful-content classifier and AdSense review.
Score a blog post →The full working-writer workflow page covering newsroom AI policy context, subscriber-trust framing, and the desk-side routine.
Open the guide →How the 0-100 score is computed, which signals carry the most weight, and what threshold to aim for before filing.
Read the guide →Free to try, no card. 0-100 score in thirty seconds, sentence-level highlights, editorial register, attribution preserved.