Inspect reconstructs the full revision history of any Google Doc — every writing session, paste event, struggle moment, and revision cluster — into a clear, documentable picture. Generates a printable Process View report you can save as a PDF or hand to a department head. Other tools charge for this. Inspect doesn't.
Inspect reads Google's revision history and surfaces it in a structure built for teachers. Everything stays in your browser — nothing is transmitted or stored.
See the complete arc of how the document came to be: when writing happened, how long each session lasted, and how much was written per sitting. A two-week assignment written in one overnight session tells its own story.
Every paste event is detected and logged — size, timestamp, source classification, and a novelty score showing how much of the pasted text was new to the document. Open the Paste Analysis window to read the actual pasted text alongside its classification.
An at-a-glance summary of edit patterns: total writing time, deletion ratio, and revision behaviour across the document's history — plus struggle moments showing where the writer cycled through deletions and rewrites in the same place. The behavioural trace of revising in place.
Watch the document being written from the first keystroke to the final version, at speeds from 1× to 200×. Paste events and struggle moments are marked on the playback timeline — jump directly to anything that caught your attention in the sidebar.
One click generates an observational report you can save as a PDF or hand to a department head: sessions, paste activity (with the actual pasted text), struggle moments, and five research-cited writing-process metrics. Form fields for Student / Assignment / Course are filled in your browser before printing — no transmission, no AI, no verdict. Pairs naturally with a Turnitin report and a StyleMatch report as one of three independent signals.
Playback opens in a dedicated window.
Navigate by step, or let it run at any speed.
Inspect (with the Process View report) is genuinely free — you can use it on every document you teach, every term, with no account. But it answers one question: how was this written? Two paid tools answer different questions.
Inspect shows how a document was built. It can't tell you whether the writing style matches the student's known voice — that requires a controlled writing sample and a metric comparison across two documents.
Inspect reads metadata — it doesn't use AI. For sentence-level consistency scoring, internal coherence analysis, or AI-generated follow-up questions for a student conversation, you need Verify.
Inspect's Process View report tells you how the document was written. When you need to ask whether the writing sounds like the student — or want AI-assisted close reading before a difficult conversation — PaperTrail goes further. Both unlock in the same extension.
Compare a controlled in-class sample against submitted work across eight stylometric metrics. The only PaperTrail tool that compares two pieces of writing against each other.
Internal consistency within one essay, or ten-dimension comparison against a controlled sample. Generates AI-suggested follow-up questions for the student conversation.
Inspect reads revision metadata. Nothing is transmitted, stored, or logged. Everything stays in your browser.
Students never touch PaperTrail. No logins, sign-ups, or data collection of any kind.
Inspect reads revision events — timestamps, edit sizes, paste signals — not the text of documents.
Designed with North American school privacy requirements in mind. No ads, no data resale, no tracking.
Install the extension, open any student Google Doc you have access to, and run it. No account. No setup. No student interaction required.
⬇ Add PaperTrail to Chrome