Understanding your results
The analysis has finished and your document has come back with parts of it marked. This page explains what those marks mean, and what is worth doing about them.
The short version: a mark is a place to go and look, and nothing more than that. You are the one who decides what it means.
Two marks, not eleven
Every passage that gets marked comes back as one of two things.
AUTHENTIC, in gold. This passage carries the small marks of a person writing — a turn of phrase that goes slightly sideways, a rhythm that breaks, a specific detail that nobody would invent to fill a gap. Keep it. When you are stuck rewriting something else, read your gold passages first, because that is what you sound like when you are not trying.
SUSPECT, in grey. This passage reads the way machine writing tends to read. Read it aloud, and if it does not sound like you, write that bit again in your own words.
Everything else on the page is unmarked, which means nothing was noticed about it either way.
There used to be eleven colours here, one for each signal the engine looks at, and we took them away in version 4.51.0 because learning a taxonomy of eleven colours is not a thing anyone should have to do before reading their own essay. The eleven signals still run, they still carry the weights they always did, and developers calling the API still get every one of them back in the response. What changed is only what we put in front of you, and the reason is that the colours were only ever answering one question — which bits should I go and look at — and that question has two answers.
Click a mark to see why
A mark on its own tells you where to look but not what was noticed, so click any highlighted passage and the reasoning opens beside it. Where two reviewers argued the passage out between them, you get what each of them said, including the parts they disagreed about.
You can rewrite the passage where it sits, without leaving the page or losing your place in the document.
There is no percentage, anywhere
You will not find a score in UnTXT. Not in the app, not on a shared link, not in the wording attached to a mark. We removed the last of them in version 4.49.0.
A number invites you to work it downwards, and working a number downwards is not the same activity as writing better, though it feels close enough to it that people do it for hours. The passages are what we report because the passages are the part you can actually act on. There is more on this at Why percentage scores fail.
What a healthy document looks like
Not a document with no marks. A real essay written by a real person will pick up some grey, particularly in the places where academic convention pushes everybody into the same shapes — hedged claims, formal transitions, a conclusion that restates the argument.
What is worth paying attention to is the pattern rather than the count.
Grey running in long unbroken stretches. A paragraph marked end to end says more than five scattered sentences do, and it is usually the place to start.
Almost no gold anywhere. Even careful formal writing normally carries some marks of the person doing it. A document with none is often one that has been polished until the writer has gone out of it, which happens with heavy AI editing and also happens with heavy human editing at two in the morning.
Grey sitting between gold. One section reading differently from the ones around it is the patchwork pattern, and it is worth reading those sections next to each other to see whether they sound like the same person on the same day.
Grey at the very end. Conclusions are where machine writing is most predictable, because models reliably acknowledge a limitation and then pivot to what future work might do. If your last paragraph is marked, write down what you actually think the argument showed, and what you would genuinely argue for next.
When you think a mark is wrong
Sometimes it is. The engine is working from statistics about how text tends to read, and you are the only person in the room who knows how you wrote it.
Before you dismiss it, three things are worth checking. Read the sentence out loud and listen for whether it sounds like something you would say or something you assembled. Look for whether the same phrasing turns up elsewhere in the document, because repetition makes the signal stronger. Ask whether the wording is specific to your argument or whether it would sit just as comfortably in somebody else's essay on a different subject, since interchangeable is most of what the engine is picking up on.
If you have done that and you are confident the passage is yours, leave it alone. Nothing is required of you.
If you are reviewing somebody else's work
Teacher and Professional accounts run on a stricter threshold, which we call Confidence Guard. A passage has to carry a stronger signal before it gets marked at all, so the formal register that students are taught to write in does not fill the page with grey.
For anything that needs a record, the toolbar above the editor has a Download, which gives you an A4 PDF carrying the date, the word count and the marked passages. It is meant for an integrity file or a meeting, and it is deliberately a record of what was noticed rather than a verdict on anybody.
There is a longer guide at Reviewing student work.
The thing this is not
UnTXT does not prove anything, and we would rather say so here than have you find out in a room where it matters. Detection is probabilistic, human writing sometimes reads as machine writing, and a mark is evidence that a passage reads a certain way rather than evidence about who wrote it.
Agency is yours to keep. Autonomy is ours to offer.