SEO'n'AI - AI Image check&mark

Mark your AI generated images — visibly for your visitors, machine-readably for everything else. One click in the media library gives an image both halves of the disclosure: a badge wherever the image appears on your site, and an IPTC / C2PA provenance label written losslessly into the file itself. If the EU AI Act's transparency rules are on your mind: this is the technical half of that disclosure. Whether it satisfies your obligations is a legal question, and the FAQ below is honest about it. This is not a watermark plugin. It works on the layer underneath: the provenance metadata inside your image files. Image generators are increasingly expected to embed a machine-readable marking — an IPTC DigitalSourceType value in XMP, or a C2PA manifest. SEO'n'AI - AI Image check&mark opens your files and reads it. It tells you which images carry such a marking, which do not — and it can write the missing label into them. What makes this different

• It labels both layers at once. Marking an image gives it the visible badge on the page and the machine-readable marking in the file — the human-readable and the machine-readable side of the same disclosure.
• It writes losslessly. The XMP packet is inserted into the container by hand — JPEG APP1, PNG iTXt, WebP RIFF chunk. The compressed image data is copied through byte for byte. Nothing is re-encoded, no quality is lost. Watermarking plugins cannot do this, because re-encoding is how they work.
• It does not touch a single pixel. The badge is a CSS overlay you can restyle or switch off at any moment.
• It reads provenance metadata, too. Uploads are inspected on arrival; if the file declares itself as AI generated — via IPTC in XMP or a C2PA / Content Credentials manifest — the image is marked automatically. No other step needed.
• It tells you where the badge does not appear — bluntly, on its own settings screen, instead of letting you assume it is everywhere.

Features

• A per-image checkbox in the attachment details panel, and a one-click "Mark as AI generated" link on every row of the media list
• A Marking details screen per image: what the file actually carries — IPTC DigitalSourceType, C2PA, per generated size — including the raw XMP block, so you can verify rather than trust
• A badge — the visible AI label — in the corner of every image WordPress renders, with configurable text, position, size and style
• An honest alt text, so screen reader users get the disclosure too
• A data-ai-generated="true" attribute on the image tag
• Detection of an existing marking (IPTC DigitalSourceType, C2PA) on upload, per image, for a hand-picked selection, and as one run across the whole library
• Automatic marking of uploads whose file already declares itself as AI generated
• Writing the marking into new uploads and into images already in your library, one at a time, or as one batch run over everything that is missing it
• A filter and a status column in the media library

Neither the reading nor the writing is held back: you can examine every image in your library, and write the marking into every image that needs one, with no limits and no quota. For running your own site, this plugin is complete. A file is never given a second metadata block. If it already carries XMP from another tool — a photo editor, a stock library — that block is left exactly as it is and the plugin says so instead of writing next to it. Honest about the limits The badge — the visible half of the label — is a CSS overlay. It appears where WordPress renders the page, and nowhere else. It does not appear in:

• Social media previews — the platform loads the file, not your page
• The image file itself, when downloaded or opened by direct URL
• RSS feeds and newsletters
• Lightboxes that rebuild the image element
• Google Images, scrapers and hotlinking third parties

Images used as a CSS background used to be on that list as well. Page builders lean on backgrounds heavily — sliders, hero areas and section headers are almost always backgrounds rather than image tags — so a site could look completely unbadged while everything was in fact working. The smart check closes that gap: switch it on and the finished page is inspected once before it is sent, including the stylesheet files on your server, and the badge is placed onto whatever element carries a marked background. It is off by default, because it looks at the whole page. One thing to remember either way: if you run a caching plugin, clear its cache after marking an image. A cached page was built before the marking existed and keeps being served exactly as it was, so the badge looks missing when the page is simply old. The plugin says all of this plainly on its own settings screen, under "Where it reaches", along with ways to deal with what is left. Optional add-on SEO'n'AI - AI Image check&mark Pro is a separate, paid plugin from the author's own shop, built for agencies and editors maintaining large libraries as a service. Its centrepiece is burning the badge into the image files themselves, across every generated size, with a backup of the originals and a one-click restore; around that it adds batch tooling for large libraries. None of that code is in this plugin, and this plugin never downloads it — if you want it, you install it yourself.

1.5.0

• New: smart check for images used as a CSS background. Page builders — Divi, Avada, WPBakery and others — usually build sliders and hero areas from background images rather than image tags, and a background has nothing for a badge to attach to. With the smart check enabled, the finished page is inspected once before it goes out: background images are picked up from the markup, from style blocks, and from the stylesheet files on your own server, and the badge is placed onto the element carrying them. Off by default; enable it on the settings screen if badges are missing.
• New: the settings screen reports what the last page view actually found — how many background images were seen, how many were traced back to your media library, and how many badges were placed. If something is still slipping through, you can see it instead of guessing.
• An image whose badge is already burnt into the file is skipped by the smart check, so it is never disclosed twice.
• The settings and coverage screens now point out that a page cache has to be cleared after marking an image — a cached page keeps being served as it was built, which looks like a missing badge but is just an old page.

1.4.0

• New uploads are now inspected no matter how they arrive. Until now the check was only registered on admin requests, so an image dragged straight onto a block in the editor — which uploads over the REST API — was never looked at, while the same image inserted through the media modal was. WP-CLI imports and front-end upload forms were missed for the same reason.
• Added the sicm_scan_on_upload filter to switch that inspection off for large imports.
• Multisite: uninstalling now clears settings and flags on every site of the network, not just the one the uninstall happens to run on.
• Multisite: activating for the network writes the defaults on every site, and a site created later starts with them too.
• Multisite: deactivating for the network now unschedules the hourly verification on every site instead of only one.

1.3.8

• Settings input is now surface-sanitized at the request boundary, before any filter callback can see it, with field-level validation unchanged on top.
• Removed the plugin's own bulk-actions filter; the media bulk action this plugin offers (the read-only marking check) hooks WordPress directly.

1.3.7

• The AI column now also shows what the library scan found in files that are not marked in WordPress yet — before, scan results were invisible in the list view.
• The completion message of a scan or write run survives the automatic page reload.

1.3.6

• Text domain now matches the wordpress.org slug (seonai-ai-image-checkmark). Translations are delivered through translate.wordpress.org.
• The bulk-marking helper moved into the Pro add-on, which is its only consumer. This plugin contains no bulk-change code.

1.3.5

• The German translation now uses formal address ("Sie") throughout, matching the rest of SEO'n'AI.

1.3.4

• The Plugin URI now points at the plugin's own page, so it no longer collides with the author URI.

1.3.3

• Removed the Plugin URI header: it pointed at the same address as the Author URI, which wordpress.org rejects, and only one of the two is required.
• Fixed the plugin description, which advertised bulk marking. That is in the paid add-on, not here.

1.3.2

• The delivery check now also compares the delivered bytes with the file on disk. It used to answer "the marking arrives" and stop there — which is true and still misleading when what arrives is an older copy of the picture. That is exactly what happens after the image itself changes: same address, so caches keep what they had.

1.3.1

• Fixed: marked images showed an empty tile in the media library's grid view. The corner label was attached to an element WordPress positions itself, and overriding that collapsed the thumbnail box — the files were never affected, only what you could see. The label now hangs off the preview container and changes no positioning at all.
• Fixed: the corner label in the grid rendered without its text.

1.3.0

• The coverage screen is now about both layers, not just the badge: it is called "Where it reaches" and puts the XMP marking in the file next to the CSS badge, so it is clear which half reaches how far.
• New hook sicm_inspect_actions, which the Pro add-on uses for single-image burn-in on the marking details screen.

1.2.0

• Fixed, and this is the important one: the IPTC property was written as an RDF attribute. That is valid, and exiftool reads it — but most online checkers and AI detectors only look for the element form, so the marking was there and nobody could find it. It is now written as an element. Files written by earlier versions are detected and rewritten automatically.
• Added a delivery check: it fetches the image the way a visitor would and compares it byte for byte with the file on disk, so a marking that is missing can be told apart from one that is being stripped on the way out.
• The details screen now shows the file path, the byte size of every generated size and the public address, so you can see at a glance whether the file you downloaded is the file the plugin wrote to.

1.1.0

• New: "Marking details" screen per image — the parsed provenance plus the raw XMP block, and the state of every generated size.
• New: a read-only run across the whole library, so images that were there before the plugin was installed finally get examined.
• New: one-click marking straight from the media list row.
• New: the marking is kept in the file. Image optimisers, media replacers, thumbnail regeneration and the built-in editor all rewrite images and destroy their metadata in the process; the plugin now records what each file looked like, notices when something changed it, and writes the marking back — immediately where it can see the change, otherwise within the hour.
• New: a delivery check. It fetches the image the way a visitor would and compares it with the file on disk, so you can tell a marking that is missing from a marking that is being stripped between your server and your visitors.
• Changed: a second XMP block is never written. A file that already carries XMP from another tool is left untouched and reported as such.
• Changed: bulk marking moved to the Pro add-on. Marking one image at a time, reading every file and writing the marking stay here, without limits.
• Fixed: writing into a PNG or WebP that already had an XMP block would overwrite it.
• Fixed: the content filter could wrap an image twice when the_content ran more than once.
• Performance: detection reads only the head of large images instead of the whole file, and batch runs stop on a time budget so they cannot hit the host's execution limit.
• German translation (de_DE, de_AT, de_CH).

1.0.0

• Initial release.