Originality checks used to compare your manuscript against documents on Alfred Scholar and open-access research databases. They now search the public web as well, and the report is graded the way an Indian institution grades it.

## What changed

- **The public web is now checked.** Distinctive phrases from your manuscript are searched as exact quotes, and any page that contains them is compared properly rather than skimmed. Every web match carries its link, so you can open the page and judge it yourself.
- **Reports show the UGC 2018 level.** Level 0 through Level 3 now sits alongside the percentage, calculated after quoted material and the bibliography are excluded, which is how the regulations intend it to be read.
- **A writing signal sits beside the similarity score.** It counts stock academic phrasing and reports a density. It is a prompt to reread those sentences, not a claim about how the manuscript was written, because nothing in a text can establish that.
- **The exported PDF states its own method.** It names every source that was actually checked, and says plainly that Alfred flags runs of 8 shared words where the regulations permit ignoring 14. Your percentage may therefore read higher than your university's checker on the same manuscript, and the report explains why rather than leaving you to defend a number you cannot account for.

## Lab moves from unlimited to 20 checks a month

Unlimited made sense when a check ran entirely on your own machine's worth of arithmetic and cost nothing to run. Searching the live web costs money on every check, so the plan now includes **20 originality checks a month**. Pro stays at 1.

We would rather change the number and say so than quietly degrade the checks themselves.

## What has not changed

Your manuscript is still never stored as a source, never indexed, and never added to any database. It cannot turn up in someone else's report. Matches against another researcher's private document still show a name and a percentage only, and never a word of their text.

We still do not search paywalled publisher archives, and we do not claim to detect paraphrasing. An originality check is a prompt to confirm your quoting and citation, not a verdict.