AI detectors ranked by launch year, with every change of hands and withdrawal the cards record

Field sorted: the launch year field on each card, a year stated on the vendor page, press release or paper the card cites, read 8 to 10 November 2026. A vendor's founding year stands in for a detector launch only where the vendor dates nothing else, and the row says which it is; a Wayback Machine first-capture date is never entered, because a capture dates the archive and not the launch (GPT Radar, Grammica, IvyPanda and SEO.ai are in the second table for that reason). Earlier years rank first; ties within a year are broken by study records, then name. A card with no stated year sits in the second table with what its pages say instead. The events column is read from the card's ownership, plans and status fields and names the date and source of each rename, acquisition, closure or withdrawal; a page that redirects to a marketplace listing is recorded as a move, not a withdrawal, unless the vendor says the tool has stopped.

A launch can be dated three ways and the index takes the vendor's own. BrandWell's about page says Content at Scale launched in September 2022 and its archived FAQ says the first detector version was created in October 2022; the card carries 2022 and quotes both. Reality Defender and Codequiry date their founding, not a product; Originality.ai dates a beta model; GPTZero and Pangram date a year with no month. Research methods are dated by the paper's first arXiv posting, not its conference, so Binoculars is 2024 (posted January 2024, ICML 2024) and Fast-DetectGPT 2023 (posted October 2023, ICLR 2024). A press report or a review site never sets the year, which is why 43 cards state none: their pages do not say.

The 2027 census tabulates this ranking's years, 29 stated and 43 not, and the Q3 2027 index update records the launch year metric as one of the two fields added in the quarter, both read 10 November 2026.