The Draftback alternative that also checks for AI

Why people look for a Draftback alternative

Draftback is a Chrome extension, first released in 2014, that replays the edit history of a Google Doc and summarizes writing activity. It has over 500,000 users, most of them teachers, and for a decade it was free. It now requires a paid subscription after a trial: $9.99 per month or $100 per year at the regular rate, and $6.99 per month or $40 per year for teachers.

Its author also takes a deliberate stance against AI detection. Draftback's FAQ says it will not flag anything as suspicious and presents only "uninterpreted playback, statistics, visualizations" for you to judge yourself. That's a defensible philosophy, and it's also the reason many teachers in 2026 go looking for something more. Watching a full replay of every essay doesn't scale to a class of 120, and a replay alone can't tell you whether the text reads like ChatGPT or whether the typing was scripted.

Draftback vs Checked4AI

What Checked4AI adds on top of the replay

A Natural Typing score you can read at a glance

Watching a full replay of a 2,000-word essay takes time, even at 10×. Checked4AI summarizes the whole revision history into one Natural Typing score from 0% to 100%, built from the delete ratio, keystroke timing variation and the volume of pasted text. A score in the 70–100% range is consistent with organic drafting. Below 40% means the document arrived in large pastes with few revisions, and the replay is where you look next.

An AI content check on the text itself

Typing patterns tell you how a document was assembled. The AI content check tells you what the text reads like. Pro subscribers get this automatically every time a replay opens: an AI-generated likelihood score with a one-sentence explanation, shown next to the typing analysis. Free users can paste any passage into the checker five times. Draftback offers neither.

Auto-typer detection

The newest way to fake a human-looking history is to paste AI text into a script that types it out one character at a time. To a plain replay tool it looks like genuine typing. Checked4AI looks at inter-keystroke timing and flags the suspiciously uniform rhythm that scripts produce and hands do not.

Video export

When you need to show a colleague, a department head, or a student's family how a document was written, a link to a browser extension is not evidence. Pro users can export the full replay as a video file, with every keystroke, paste and deletion exactly as it happened.

Price

Checked4AI is free to install and stays free for 10 replay views and 5 pasted-text AI checks, with no trial clock. Pro is $3.79 per month or $40 per year for everyone. That's the same annual price Draftback charges teachers, and less than half its regular rate, with the AI checks, auto-typer detection and video export included.

How to switch from Draftback

1. Install Checked4AI from the Chrome Web Store. You can keep Draftback installed; they don't conflict.
2. Open any Google Doc you have access to. A Checked4AI button appears in the Docs toolbar.
3. Click it. The extension syncs the revision history and opens the viewer in a new tab.
4. Press play, or skip straight to the Natural Typing score and the session timeline.

Like Draftback, Checked4AI keeps revision data in your browser's local storage. Nothing about the document is uploaded to Checked4AI's servers unless you run an AI check, and then only the text needed for that check is sent. See the privacy policy for the full picture.

When Draftback is still the right choice

If you specifically want a tool that refuses to interpret anything and you're happy to watch every replay yourself, Draftback does that well and has a long track record in schools, including district privacy agreements. Checked4AI's free tier includes 10 replay views, so the cheapest way to decide is to run both on the same document and see which answer you actually needed.