What SynthID is, in one paragraph
SynthID is a watermarking technology from Google DeepMind. For images, the mark is woven into the pixel values themselves, in a pattern people cannot see. It carries very little information, but it is designed to survive common edits such as resizing, compression and filters, and a matching detector can read it.
Other companies use their own invisible watermarks. OpenAI has said it added a SynthID-based mark to images from ChatGPT in 2026. Google's detector and a vendor's own detector are separate things, so a mark from one generator is not necessarily readable by another's checker.