How TickAI works — and what we do with your data
A compliance tool has to be trustworthy itself. Here's exactly how we detect AI content, what we store, and the legal thinking behind our guidance.
How we detect AI content
Evidence first, a human always in the loop. We never guess from pixels alone.
1. We read provenance signals first
Before anything else, we read the hidden signals already inside a file: C2PA / Content Credentials manifests, EXIF/IPTC/XMP metadata that names a generative tool, and SynthID-style signals where a tool discloses them. These are the strongest, most objective evidence that AI was involved.
2. AI triage suggests — it never decides
Where provenance is silent, our analysis suggests whether an image looks realistic enough to matter, or is clearly stylised or only lightly edited. It's a suggestion with the reasoning attached, not a verdict.
3. A person confirms every call
Nothing is published on the strength of a guess. Your team reviews each flagged item, sees the evidence we found, and makes the final decision. Every decision is written to an append-only audit trail.
How accurate is the detection?
Strong where it counts — and honest about where it isn't.
Independently benchmarked
The image model behind our analysis sits at the top of independent AI-detection benchmarks — in an external university study across roughly 80,000 images, it came out as the most accurate of the tools tested.
Honest about the limits
No detector is ever 100% reliable. Accuracy shifts with the generator used, the quality of the image, and any editing applied afterwards — so we show our reasoning instead of a false sense of certainty.
A person makes the call
That's why detection is only ever a recommendation. Your team sees the evidence and confirms each decision, which is what makes the result defensible.
What you can do with it
Practical controls that fit the badges to your site — not the other way round.
Customise your labels
Start from the official EU disclosure icons or design your own badges — control colour, size, position and wording, or upload your own artwork.
Show only to EU visitors
Turn on EU-only serving and disclosure labels appear for visitors in the EU, while the rest of your audience sees your site unchanged.
Different labels per image
The disclosure icon is decided per asset, and you can override the exact badge used on a single image without touching the rest of your site.
Install in one line
Paste one small async snippet into your site's head — or follow our step-by-step guides for Shopify, WordPress, GTM and more. No template rewrites.
Exclude pages or images
List pages to skip during a scan, and mark any individual image as exempt so it never carries a badge — even when it sits on a page you monitor.
Reversible any time
Labels are served client-side and never baked into your source. Change a decision or remove the snippet and they're gone — nothing is permanent.
Ongoing monitoring and reports
Compliance isn't a one-off. TickAI keeps watching, and keeps the paper trail.
We keep scanning
On paid plans TickAI re-scans your site automatically — monthly, weekly or daily depending on your plan — so new AI content is caught and queued for review as your site changes.
You get alerted
When a scan finds new content that may need disclosure, we email you — immediately or as a weekly summary — so nothing slips through unnoticed.
Reports you can hand over
Every decision lands in an append-only audit trail you can export to PDF or JSON. Use the dated record as evidence for a regulator, platform, customer or your own board.
What we store, and for how long
The short version: as little as we can, for no longer than we need.
Free scans are kept for 14 days
A free scan runs against publicly accessible content only. We keep the report for 14 days so you can come back to it, then it's deleted. No account or email is needed to run one.
Your review history is append-only
Once you have an account, every review decision is logged and can't be edited or deleted — that log is your evidence that each asset was actually reviewed.
Live labels are reversible and in your control
The disclosure overlay is served by a lightweight snippet — no changes to your source files, fully removable at any time. You choose whether labels show to everyone or only to EU visitors.
Full details are in our Privacy Policy and Data Processing Agreement.
The legal thinking behind our guidance
TickAI is built around Article 50 of the EU AI Act — mainly Article 50(4), the duty to disclose certain AI-generated or AI-manipulated content. We deliberately don't push blanket labelling: the law is narrower than a lot of compliance marketing suggests, and the real question is which realistic, potentially misleading assets plausibly need a disclosure. Our job is to help you identify those, decide, and keep documented evidence of your decisions.
TickAI provides tooling and general information, not legal advice, and Article 50 isn't the whole picture — the UCPD, Consumer Rights Directive and DSA may also apply to your content. Read our note on this.