How can I prevent plagiarism?

Hi Reader,

I got a few responses to yesterday's email about getting plagiarised on Medium.

A few readers said they were sorry this happened to me.

I'm hanging in there ;)

One writer wanted to know if Medium told me someone plagiarised my work.

That writer is having trouble with scammers, too.

And another writer asked, "How can I prevent plagiarism?"

Well, I found out about the episode after a reader wrote in a while back.

He'd stumbled across one of my articles under someone else's name.

Chances are, someone is republishing my content right now.

All in an effort to earn more money.

AI certainly is.

Last year, I paid a team of writers articles thousands of dollars to write articles for my sites.

I logged into my web stats to find ChatGPT is crawling my website.

I don't remember giving consent to reuse content that cost me time and money to create.

It’s not just ChatGPT

Today?

Information from these articles appears at the top of Google Search results.

Google buried it under a rather unhelpful "From sources across the web" tab.

The link to my article languishes even further down the page.

The problem?

Google is keeping searchers on page zero and reducing clicks to smaller publishers.

But it's still using content from small publishers like me for its users.

That means less traffic and less revenue for me.

Arguably, it's plagiarism, too.

But Google doesn't owe me any traffic.

That's how the content publishing game works these days.

I don't lose too much sleep worrying about plagiarism.

I'm far more interested in building a relationship with readers.

I want to write what AI can't.

And build a relationship with you.

No one can rip that off.

Write on,

Bryan Collins

PS If you still need help with plagiarism, we rounded up the best plagiarism checkers.