In a world where AI can generate convincing essays, reports, and memos in seconds, honest writers find themselves having to prove a negative: “I didn’t cheat. I really wrote this.”
TypeTrace is our answer to that problem — a provenance layer for writing that lets you attach proof of authorship to the documents that matter most.
What TypeTrace does
At its core, TypeTrace does three things:
- Captures your writing process in a secure way while you work.
- Builds a provenance report that shows how a document came into existence.
- Lets you share that proof with whoever needs to verify your work.
You keep writing in Google Docs or Microsoft Word on the web. TypeTrace runs alongside you, quietly collecting the minimal data required to reconstruct your writing timeline.
Who it’s for
Students and academics
Students use TypeTrace to protect themselves against false AI‑cheating allegations. When you submit an essay or thesis with a provenance report attached, your instructor can see:
- How many words were typed live versus pasted.
- How long you spent on the assignment and in how many sessions.
- A replayable timeline of your writing process.
For supervisors, it’s a way to confirm that a piece of work represents genuine effort — without relying on brittle AI detectors.
Professionals and knowledge workers
Freelancers, consultants, and internal teams use TypeTrace to show clients that their deliverables were actually written by humans, not copy‑pasted from a model.
A TypeTrace report attached to a strategy deck or analysis can demonstrate:
- That the document evolved over time, not in a single paste event.
- That key sections were typed live and iterated on.
- Where any boilerplate or templates were reused.
It’s a practical way to keep trust high in client relationships as AI tools become more capable.
Institutions and organizations
At an institutional scale, TypeTrace provides a way to move away from adversarial AI detection and toward collaborative integrity workflows.
Departments and organizations can:
- Require provenance reports for specific high‑stakes submissions.
- Use dashboards to see which documents are fully typed versus heavily pasted.
- Focus review time on genuinely ambiguous cases, supported by session replays.
How a proof is created
When you enable TypeTrace for a document, three things happen:
- Events are recorded locally as you type, delete, and paste.
- A secure log of those events is encrypted and synced to our servers.
- A provenance report can be generated on demand when you’re ready.
The report includes high‑level stats (words typed live, paste events, duration) and the option to replay your writing timeline. It is designed to be legible to non‑technical reviewers: instructors, clients, managers, and integrity officers.
Privacy by default
Recording keystroke‑level data raises obvious privacy questions. We built TypeTrace around a simple rule: collect the minimum necessary data for authorship proof, and nothing more.
In practice, that means:
- Scoped recording to specific environments and documents.
- Zero‑knowledge encryption for document content on our side.
- Clear controls to export, revoke, and delete proofs.
You can read more about the technical details in our dedicated privacy overview, but the principle is straightforward: TypeTrace should help you defend your work, not create a new surface for it to be misused.
Where we’re going next
This first version of TypeTrace focuses on three things: students, professionals, and early institutional pilots. From here, we’re working on:
- Richer session visualizations that make reviews even faster.
- Deeper integrations with learning management and document systems.
- Better tools for writers to see and understand their own writing patterns.
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I could just show how I wrote this,” TypeTrace is for you. We’re excited to keep building it in partnership with the students, educators, and teams who need it most.