You can now turn off Google Gemini’s visible watermarks
Heat trend
Collecting trend data
The percentage is based on available heat signal, not comment count or independent people.
OpenAI model activity is surfacing — worth tracking for capability changes, ecosystem impact, and availability.
Google now allows users to remove visible watermarks from AI-generated images, videos, and music created with tools like Gemini and Flow.…
Google will still embed invisible SynthID and C2PA watermarks into AI-generated images, videos, and music.
by Emma Roth
Aug 14, 2026, 4:39 PM UTC
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
Emma Roth
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Google will now allow you to remove visible watermarks from the images, videos, and music made with AI tools. With the update , you can toggle off a new “Media watermark” setting in Gemini and Google’s AI video generator, Flow.
When toggled off, Google will remove the “sparkle” watermark that appears in the bottom-right corner of content generated with the company’s Nano Banana and Omni models. Though visible watermarks are now optional, AI-generated content will have invisible SynthID watermarks and C2PA metadata embedded in the background, according to Josh Woodward , the vice president of Google Labs, Gemini, and AI Studio. That means you can still verify if a piece of content has one of these markers by asking Gemini or Search if it’s AI-generated.
While this change might make it more difficult to quickly discern if an image or video is AI-generated, many users have already been editing out visible watermarks. Other AI image generators, like OpenAI and Meta’s, also don’t apply visible watermarks. Instead, OpenAI relies on SynthID and C2PA to signal whether something is AI-generated, while Meta launched its own Content Seal standard . Anthropic also announced this week that it’s applying invisible watermarks to both AI-generated text and images.
Google plans on rolling out its new watermark setting to Search as well, but the toggle won’t launch in countries that require visible watermarks.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
- Emma Roth
-
The Verge Daily
A free daily digest of the news that matters most.
Email (required)