Google’s new SynthID website can identify AI-generated media
Google opened a public SynthID site that checks whether images, video, or audio were AI-generated.
Google opened a public website that uses SynthID to check whether an image, video, or audio clip was generated by AI. The checker, previously limited to journalists, media professionals, and researchers, accepts common formats including JPG, PNG, MP4, MOV, WAV, and MP3. Google says Nano Banana, Veo, Lyria, Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI, and Vids watermark output with SynthID, and that people already make about one million verification requests a day. OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao also support SynthID, while Microsoft and Meta use their own watermarking approaches, and Google notes the tools can miss content from their own models.
- Public SynthID site follows a limited pilot for journalists and researchers.
- It accepts common image, video, and audio file formats.
- Google models including Nano Banana, Veo, Lyria, and Gemini embed SynthID watermarks.
- OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Kakao support SynthID; Google reports about one million daily checks.
- Microsoft and Meta use separate standards, and detection remains imperfect.
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In Brief
Posted:
7:00 AM PDT · October 7, 2026
Google on Tuesday launched a new site that lets anyone verify whether a piece of media, be it an image, a video or an audio clip, is generated using AI.
The company had made this tool available to select journalists, media professionals and researchers for testing at Google I/O last year, and is now opening up access to the tool to everyone.
The site supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF formats for images; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for videos; and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio.
Google is using SynthID, which it introduced in 2023, to identify whether media is AI-generated. The company’s Nano Banana, Veo and Lyria models, as well as tools with generation capabilities, like Gemini, Flow, ProducerAI and Vids, all use SynthID to watermark any media they generate.
OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao also support SynthID, and OpenAI maintains its own site for checking content. Apple is said to be adding support soon, too.
Google has baked SynthID verification into the Gemini app and Google Chrome. The company said people currently make 1 million requests to verify content every day.
Microsoft and Meta have their own standards for watermarking and verifying content. However, these tools are not infallible, often failing to identify content created by their makers’ models.
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