Your Publish Date Is Self-Reported: Keeping a Date No One Can Rewrite in the Age of AI

Suppose that the morning after you publish, a near-copy appears: paragraphs reordered, phrasing changed, the skeleton identical. How would you show that yours came first?

Rewriting has become cheap

Paraphrasing, restructuring and translating used to take human time. Now a language model does it in moments. The numbers show how common machine-written and machine-read content already is.

Source	Finding
Imperva, 2025 Bad Bot Report	51% of web traffic in 2024 was automated; malicious bots made up 37%, up from 32%1
Cloudflare, July 2025	GPTBot requests grew 305% from May 2024 to May 2025 on its network2
Cloudflare, August 2025	About 80% of AI crawling over the previous year was for model training3
NewsGuard	News sites publishing AI-generated content with little human oversight: 49 in May 2023, 3,749 by June 20264
Ahrefs, May 2025	74.2% of 900,000 pages first published in April 2025 contained some AI-generated content5
NeurIPS 2023 paper	A paraphrasing model cut an AI-text detector's accuracy from 70.3% to 4.6%6

These are vendor or researcher estimates, each with its own method, and none of them is the chance that your post gets copied. They do show that rewriting is easy and hard to detect.

Your publish date is self-reported

You choose your publish date. WordPress lets you publish with a past date and change the date of a live post.⁷ The other site's date is just as self-reported, so two people saying "I was first" settles nothing. Web archives help, but you do not control whether or when they capture your page.

What you need is for someone other than you to write down the date when you publish, somewhere nobody can rewrite later.

What DateSealed does

• It receives only the SHA-256 hash of your post, computed in your browser (or on your own server with the WordPress plugin). The text is never sent.
• It attaches an RFC 3161 time stamp, returned immediately, and a Bitcoin record through OpenTimestamps, anchored within hours.
• Nobody can write a time into the Bitcoin ledger after the fact. Once anchored, the date can be checked with the proof file and the ledger alone, even if DateSealed disappears.

More detail is in "How to show you made it first" and "Why I built DateSealed".

Automatic on WordPress

A habit you must remember will not survive a busy week. The DateSealed WordPress plugin:

• computes the hash of the post text on your server at every publish and update, and sends only the hash;
• adds a new record for each update, so the first publication is never overwritten and the revision history builds up;
• can show a badge linking to the record page (optional);
• needs WordPress 5.8+ and PHP 8.2+.

Download it from the API page, then in WordPress go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, activate it and open Settings → DateSealed. A wordpress.org listing is under review.

What the record does not say

• It does not show whether a human or a model wrote the text.
• It does not show that the content is accurate or original, who wrote it, or who owns it.
• It does not guarantee legal effect. In Japan, official status belongs to time stamps from accredited services; in the EU, to qualified electronic time stamps.⁸

"It existed at this time" is a useful place to start a conversation. It will not settle one by itself. Use the record as one piece of evidence next to the rest.

Habits that make the record worth having

1. Keep the original. DateSealed holds only hashes.
2. Keep the proof files. Store the .tsr and .ots with the original so you can verify without DateSealed.
3. Record at publish time. The record's time is when you made it; every day of delay weakens it.
4. Do not oversell it. For a case that matters, add formal registration or an accredited or qualified time stamp.