This article was updated in April 2026.
Grammarly Authorship debuted in 2024 as a way for users to track how they create a piece of writing and, therefore, provide a document that could, in theory, show that they did not use AI. Or if they were openly using AI to assist their writing, Grammarly Authorship can show where and when AI is used. The tool recently became available on Google Docs and expanded its functionality to include the ability to track agentic AI.
I recently revisited Grammarly’s Authorship to try out these new features. It’s been a while since I explored the tool, and I find it is more appealing now than it was in 2024 because AI writing in the school setting has gotten more problematic.
Additionally, there are increasing questions around the authenticity of work created by educators themselves. I’ve recently written about AI slop in research papers and about how some educators are using AI too much for their own work. In this environment, I can see Authorship being a useful tool for educators who want to have a document helping to verify the authenticity of their own written work. Sadly, too many beyond the classroom are comfortable passing AI-work off as their own.
Unlike most other AI detection tools, Grammarly Authorship is meant to be used by the writer, not a teacher assessing the writing later. Essentially, Grammarly Authorship acts as a beefed-up version of Google Doc’s “version history.” The tool tracks how long you spend in the document and how the writing originates: whether the user typed it or copied and pasted it.
This is because Authorship can also sometimes tell where text was copied and pasted from, and will flag text it believes is AI-generated, as well as track use of Grammarly's traditional spellcheck. All this information is provided in a sharable report that also tracks how long a piece of writing took the user and whether they wrote it over multiple sessions.
After reusing the tool for a week with various writing projects, I continue to be impressed. I see several potential beneficial uses for teachers and students, and unexpectedly, I find the tool useful for tracking how long I’ve spent working on a given writing project. (According to Grammarly Authorship, I’ve spent 22 minutes writing this story so far!)
All that said, this is, sadly, not yet a panacea that will free instructors from AI-submitted work. Grammarly Authorship, although a definite step in the right direction, still has some of the same limitations of existing AI detection tools.
What Grammarly Authorship Does Well
Grammarly Authorship works as advertised: If you turn it on, it will track your activity and provide insights into how much was typed in the document vs. copied and pasted in, etc.
In my tests, the tool correctly ID’d the material I had typed into the document, the AI-generated text I added as a test, and quotes I had copied and pasted from another document. It didn’t acknowledge that these copied-and-pasted elements were within quotation marks and cited, which would be preferred. That said, a teacher could notice the copied-and-pasted portions flagged and then quickly look to see that these were properly quoted and attributed.
It's not hard to see how a student worried about being falsely accused of AI cheating might use it as a protection mechanism. Additionally, students can use it to see exactly what parts of their papers need citations and possibly where their paraphrasing didn’t go far enough. It might also inspire a student to rewrite AI-generated text and make it their own, which may not be an ideal outcome but would at least involve some more writing practice.
Because of these features, I understand why a teacher might consider requiring students to use Grammarly Authorship, provided their institution vetted its privacy settings and permitted it. Doing so would create a paper trail for each writing assignment that could serve both the teacher and student in conversations about plagiarism and AI use.
Grammarly Authorship’s Limitations
Despite its many great features, the AI detection portion of Grammarly Authorship will be subject to the same ethical concerns as other AI detection tools. Since AI detection tools are never 100 percent accurate, these can and have led to damaging false accusations of AI use.
Authorship flags text as copied and pasted into the document as well as being AI-generated, which can help somewhat, so a teacher might ask a student where these three paragraphs that were copied and pasted came from rather than accusing the student of AI use. However, a savvy student (and students who use AI are often savvy), might just generate AI text then type it into their document that Authorship is checking. In that case, even though the work will be flagged as AI-generated, the student will have a document showing that they spent a significant amount of time typing their paper — thereby potentially falsely indicating they wrote it.
These misgivings aside, I believe it’s likely that requiring students to use Authorship would cut back on some AI use. It’s harder to type out an AI-generated answer than simply copying and pasting it.
When I first explored Grammarly Authorship, these drawbacks made me conclude that I wouldn’t consider requiring students to use it. I worried that having students track their work was an invasion of their privacy and could limit the ways in which they chose to generate work. "What if they wanted to copy and paste content they had written in an email draft or via a text to themselves?" I wondered. Using Authorship might cause the content they generated to look suspicious.
While this is still a valid concern, the use of AI has increased to such an extent that I’m more willing to explore any tools that might help, even if there are some downsides.
Would I Use Authorship With Students?
Even though I wouldn’t require it, I would recommend Grammarly Authorship to students, provided my institution approved the app. As stated above, I think it can be a helpful plagiarism checker that students can use to assess their own work. It can also show them how much time they put into writing. For example, if they didn’t get the grade they wanted, maybe they would realize that they needed to spend more than a half-hour on an assignment next time.
I plan on continuing to use it for my writing and will recommend it to fellow educators for personal use. While I don’t think Grammarly Authorship answers the question of what we’re going to do about AI use in writing classes, I do like that Grammarly is exploring AI use in a way that seeks to protect human writing.
For the record, according to my Authorship report, this story was 100% typed by a human, with 2% Grammarly’s traditional grammar correction use and 0% AI-generated content.
