Plagiarism check
Check whether sentences from your article already appear on other websites, read the results, and understand the free originality check against top pages.
SerpPal has two ways to check that your article is original:
- Originality against the top 10 pages: free and automatic. It compares your text with the pages you compete against.
- Plagiarism check: searches Google for sentences from your article, word for word, to find copies anywhere on the web.
Originality against the top pages
As soon as your article has 150 words, SerpPal compares it with the top 10 competitor pages and shows the share of your text that is not repeated from them word for word. You see it:
- as Originality in the metrics on the Insights tab;
- as "Original against the top 10 pages" in the Plagiarism row of the Optimization tab.
85% or more is shown in green. Under Extra checks on the Insights tab, any paragraph that matches a top page by 35% or more is listed under Copied from top pages. Click Show to find it.
When less than half of your article is original against the top pages, your content score is cut by up to 30%. Rewrite copied passages in your own words.
Run a plagiarism check
- Open the Optimization tab and click the Plagiarism row.
- Click Check for plagiarism. The button is available once your article has 80 words.
- Wait a few seconds while SerpPal searches Google for sentences from your article.
What it checks
- SerpPal picks up to 10 sentences spread evenly across your article. It prefers longer sentences, between 12 and 45 words, and skips sentences with quotation marks (quotes are meant to match their source).
- Each sentence is searched on Google as an exact phrase, in the country and language of your analysis.
- A result counts as a match when it shares a run of at least 5 words with your sentence in its title or snippet. When the snippet shows a different part of the page, SerpPal opens the first results and looks for a run of at least 8 words in the page itself.
- Your own website (from the project settings) and your article's target URL are ignored, so your published article does not count as a copy of itself.
Reading the results
- Plagiarism row: the share of checked sentences that were not found elsewhere, for example
90%. - Sentences found on other sites: for example "1 of 10".
- For each sentence found elsewhere, you see the sentence and a chip for each site that has it (up to 5). Click a chip to open that page, or click Show to find the sentence in your article.
- "No copies found. Your text looks original." means none of the checked sentences were found.
- Checked shows the date and time of the last check. Click Check again after you make changes.
The last result is saved with the article, so you see it the next time you open the editor.
Errors
| Message | What to do |
|---|---|
| "Write a few more full sentences first (at least 3 sentences of 12+ words)" | The check needs at least 3 full sentences of 12 words or more. Write more, or join very short sentences. |
| "The Google search failed, so nothing was checked. Try again in a moment." | Every search failed. Wait a moment and click Check again. |
| "3 of 10 sentences could not be checked." | Some searches failed. The result is based on the sentences that worked. |
Limits
- The check looks at a sample of up to 10 sentences, not every sentence. A clean result is a good sign, not a guarantee.
- It finds pages that Google has indexed. Very new pages, pages behind a login and documents Google does not show are not found.
- It does not use your analyses or AI words.
If you find a match
- Check the page. A match can be a common phrase, a quote, or someone who copied your published article.
- If the text is yours and someone copied it, there is nothing to change in your article.
- If the text came from another source, rewrite it in your own words, or quote it and link to the source.
- Click Check again to confirm.
To make AI text read more like your own voice, see Humanize in the editor.
Common questions
Why does my article show as copied when I wrote it? It is probably already published. Results from the project's website are ignored. If it is published somewhere else, set that page as the article's target URL (More, then Target URL) so its site is ignored too.
Is this the same as an AI detector? No. The plagiarism check looks for copies of your sentences. To check whether text reads as AI-written, use the AI checker.