Our Mission
Something changed. Teachers who spent careers helping students find their voice now spend energy wondering whether the work in front of them actually belongs to the student who submitted it. AI tools, contract cheating, and simple copy-paste have made that question harder to answer — and harder to document.
PaperTrail Academic exists for that moment of doubt. Not to accuse. Not to replace teacher judgment. But to give teachers a structured, repeatable, documentable way to look at the evidence — and to have a fair, defensible conversation with a student, a parent, or an administrator.
Every tool in the PaperTrail suite is built around one principle: the evidence should speak clearly, and the judgment should stay yours.
PaperTrail Academic
A suite of tools built directly inside Google Docs that shows teachers exactly how a document was produced — every revision, every paste, every pause. Evidence you can document. Judgment that stays yours.
Not a verdict machine. A structured, repeatable, documentable data point for teacher judgment.
The Suite
Did the same person write this? PaperTrail gives you the evidence to find out — from a quick revision check to a full AI-assisted authorship report.
See every revision, paste, deletion, and writing session directly inside Google Docs. No setup. No account. Install and open any student document.
Compare an in-class writing sample against a submitted document and get a research-backed stylometric similarity report — right inside Google Docs.
Everything StyleMatch does, amplified by AI. Genre-aware scoring, a full narrative analysis with specific textual evidence, and locked timestamped reports.
PaperTrail Inspect
Struggle moments are regions where a student revised heavily — high deletion, rewriting, or repeated edits across a short span of time. They're one of the strongest signals of genuine engagement with the writing process.
PaperTrail automatically identifies these regions and marks them on the writing timeline. Click any ⚡ bolt in playback to jump directly to that moment and watch the revision unfold in real time.
PaperTrail Inspect
When a paste event is detected, PaperTrail shows you exactly what was pasted, when, and how novel that text is relative to the rest of the document. A high novelty score means most pasted words were new to the document — a strong signal of external sourcing.
The paste comparison viewer shows the document before and after each event, side by side, so you can see precisely what was replaced or inserted.
…the philosophical implications of this argument remain unclear to many modern scholars who have studied the period.
…the philosophical implications remain unclear. The social contract, as Rousseau described, represents a fundamental agreement between the individual and the collective, wherein natural freedoms are exchanged for civil protections guaranteed by the state.
PaperTrail StyleMatch · Coming Soon
StyleMatch runs six independent stylometric measurements on two writing samples and produces a weighted composite similarity score. Every metric has a research basis. Every score is explainable in plain English.
The report is printable. It includes a mandatory disclaimer. It's designed to be evidence — structured, repeatable, and defensible — not an accusation.
PaperTrail Verify · Coming Soon
Verify uses AI to generate a full narrative analysis with specific textual evidence, severity-ranked flags, and recommended actions — locked in a timestamped report you can bring anywhere.
TOK essays, lab reports, and formal academic writing impose their own stylistic constraints. Verify accounts for genre so the same divergence doesn't mean the same thing across assignment types.
Every finding cites specific textual evidence — not "vocabulary divergence detected" but which words, which patterns, and what they suggest. Built to support real conversations, not just produce numbers.
Reports are locked at generation time and saved to your account. The record exists independently of the document and cannot be altered after the fact.
Verify uses a per-analysis credit system. You pay only for what you use.
No flat subscription required. No surprise bills at the end of the month.
Inspect and StyleMatch run entirely in your browser. No writing sample is ever transmitted. Verify stores only report metadata — never the raw student text.
Students never interact with PaperTrail. No student logins, no student data collection, no student tracking of any kind.
Built by a teacher, for teachers. Every architectural decision has been made with student privacy front of mind — not bolted on after the fact.
PaperTrail Academic is funded by subscriptions and credits only. No advertising, no data sales, no third-party tracking.
Pricing
PaperTrail Inspect is free, unlimited, forever. StyleMatch and Verify are paid add-ons — buy only what you'll actually use.
Full revision history analysis. No account, no limits.
Includes Inspect plus stylometric authorship comparison.
Join the waitlist — email us
AI-assisted analysis. Pay only for what you use.
Also available: Pro bundle ($9.99/mo) includes Inspect + StyleMatch + 10 Verify credits/month
Questions about how PaperTrail works, privacy concerns, school or department inquiries, or early access to StyleMatch and Verify — we'd love to hear from you. PaperTrail Academic is built by a teacher, and every email gets a real reply.