Does scrub remove AI watermarks? An honest answer
People ask this a lot, so here's a straight answer: it depends which kind of watermark you mean. "AI watermark" gets used for at least three very different techniques, and they don't fail the same way. Two of them scrub can clean up. One of them, by design, nothing can reliably strip without destroying the content itself.
Fragile watermarks — scrub removes these
Plenty of images carry a simple, visible or metadata-level marker: a logo baked into a corner, a text watermark layered over the image, or a provenance tag written into the file's metadata fields. These are called fragile watermarks because they live in a specific, removable place — usually the same metadata block that carries EXIF, XMP or C2PA Content Credentials. Strip that block, and the marker goes with it. This is exactly what scrub does: it reads the file, shows you what's embedded, and removes it losslessly.
Robust image watermarks — scrub cannot remove these
Some AI image generators embed a different kind of mark: a signal spread across the actual pixel data, engineered to survive cropping, resizing, recompression and screenshots. Google's SynthID is the best-known example. It isn't stored in a metadata field you can delete — it's woven into the image content itself, on purpose, so it keeps working even after the file gets edited and re-saved. scrub does not remove this, and no honest tool can promise to. Doing so reliably would mean defeating the image's own pixel data, not just cleaning a header.
Statistical text watermarks — scrub cannot remove these either
Some AI text generators bias their word choices in a subtle, statistically detectable pattern — not visible to a reader, but recoverable by a detector that knows the pattern. There's no invisible character or hidden field to strip here; the "watermark" is the arrangement of ordinary words. The only way to remove a statistical text watermark is to substantially rewrite the text so the original word-choice pattern no longer exists. scrub's text cleanup handles zero-width characters and homoglyphs — those are real, removable artifacts — but it does not and cannot rewrite your prose to erase a statistical signature.
Why we're telling you this instead of overselling it
It would be easy to market scrub as an "AI content detector bypass" — plenty of tools do, and it would probably sell more downloads. We're not doing that, for two reasons: it isn't true, and overclaiming here would help people misrepresent AI-generated content as human-made, which isn't what this tool is for. scrub is a hidden-data cleaner, not a detection-evasion tool. If a feature can't do what a page implies it does, that's a bug in the page, not a marketing opportunity.
The short version
Fragile, metadata-level watermarks — yes, scrub strips them. Robust pixel-level watermarks like SynthID, and statistical text watermarks — no, and nothing reliably does, because they're built to survive exactly this. Get scrub free to see what's actually removable in your own files.