How the plagiarism check works
What we compare your text against, what a check costs, and how to keep quotes and references out of the score.
Updated Sep 25, 20261 min read
A plagiarism check looks for passages that match existing sources. It answers a different question from AI detection: AI-written text is usually new, so it rarely matches anything. Running both together gives you the full picture.
What we compare against
- Public web pages, found by searching for the most distinctive sentences in your text, plus pages fetched for earlier checks.
- Your library: every document already in your workspace. Documents are never compared with other customers' files.
- PDFs, paywalled journals and books aren't included.
What it costs
A plagiarism check uses 2 credits per word, on top of 1 credit per word for AI detection. A 1,000-word essay checked for both uses 3,000 credits. You'll see the total before the scan starts.
Keeping quotes and references out
Quoted passages and reference lists match their sources by design, so text in quotation marks and a reference list at the end of the document are left out of matching automatically. The report shows how many words were left out.