Summary
Google has opened its SynthID verification website to the public, giving anyone a way to check whether an image, video, or audio file was created using supported AI tools. The move comes as AI-generated content becomes increasingly common across the internet and harder to distinguish from real media.
What Happened?
Google has launched a public version of its SynthID verification website, allowing users to upload media and check whether it contains a SynthID watermark associated with AI-generated content.
The tool was previously available to a limited group of journalists, media professionals and researchers for testing. Google is now making it available to everyone.
The service can analyze several common media formats, including images, videos and audio files.
How Does Google SynthID Work?
SynthID is Google’s technology for watermarking AI-generated content. Google first introduced it in 2023 as a way to help identify media created by generative AI systems.
When supported Google AI models generate content, SynthID can embed an invisible watermark into the media. The watermark is designed to remain detectable even when the content is modified.
Google’s newer AI models and products, including Nano Banana, Veo and Lyria, use SynthID. The technology is also integrated into products such as Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI and Vids.
The new website allows users to check supported content for these signals.
What Media Can Be Checked?
Google’s verification website supports a wide range of file formats.
For images, supported formats include JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF and GIF.
For video, the service supports MP4, MOV and WEBM files. Audio files can also be checked in formats including WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC and M4A.
This makes the service useful for people working with different types of digital content rather than limiting verification to images alone.
SynthID Is Expanding Beyond Google
Google is not the only company using SynthID. According to Google, companies including OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao also support the technology.
OpenAI also operates its own content verification service, while Apple is reportedly preparing to add support for SynthID.
Google has also integrated SynthID verification into the Gemini app and Google Chrome.
The scale of interest is already significant. Google says people currently make around 1 million requests every day to verify content.
Why AI Content Verification Matters
AI-generated images, videos and audio are becoming increasingly realistic. That creates a challenge for users who want to know whether something they see online was created by a person or generated by an AI system.
Watermarking technologies such as SynthID are intended to provide an additional signal that can help answer that question.
For journalists, researchers and media organizations, this could be particularly useful when checking digital material before publishing or sharing it.
At the same time, verification systems are not perfect. Other companies, including Microsoft and Meta, have developed their own approaches for watermarking and identifying AI-generated content, but detection systems can sometimes fail to recognize content generated by their own models.
That means tools such as SynthID should be viewed as an additional verification layer rather than a guarantee that every piece of AI-generated content will be identified.
What Comes Next?
Google’s decision to make SynthID verification publicly available reflects the growing need for tools that can help people understand where digital content comes from.
As AI-generated media becomes more widespread, technologies that provide information about the origin of images, videos and audio could become an increasingly important part of online content verification.
For now, Google’s public SynthID website gives users a straightforward way to check supported media and see whether Google’s AI watermark can be detected.
Conclusion
Google is making AI-content verification more accessible by opening its SynthID website to everyone. The tool can check images, videos and audio for SynthID watermarks used by supported AI systems.
While the technology cannot identify every piece of AI-generated content, its wider availability gives users, journalists and researchers another tool for checking digital media in an increasingly AI-generated internet.