Google launched a public site on Tuesday that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media was generated using AI. The tool had previously been available only to select journalists, media professionals, and researchers for testing since Google I/O last year, and is now open to everyone. Google says people currently make 1 million verification requests a day.

The site supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF for images; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for videos; and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio. Detection is based on SynthID, the watermarking system Google introduced in 2023. Media from Google's Nano Banana, Veo, and Lyria models, as well as generation-capable tools like Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI, and Vids, all carry SynthID marks. OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao also support SynthID, while Apple is said to be adding support soon.

Google has baked SynthID verification into the Gemini app and Chrome. These tools are not infallible, though — they often fail to identify content created by their makers' own models, and Microsoft and Meta run their own separate watermarking standards. Still, a free public checker is a practical consumer tool in an election of misinformation.