Content Provenance
Content provenance is the record of where a piece of digital content came from and what happened to it since: who made it, how, when, and what edits followed. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) publishes an open standard called Content Credentials that records this for images, video, audio and documents in a way that shows tampering.
Source: C2PA, C2PA Explainer (Content Credentials specification 2.3), checked October 29, 2026
What Content Provenance means for your business
The C2PA's explainer is careful about what this proves. Content Credentials don't say whether a picture shows the truth. They show whether the record attached to it is well formed, hasn't been tampered with, and comes from a trusted signer.
For a small business, the idea matters in two places. Your own photos and videos of real jobs are proof of your work, at a time when AI can make convincing fake photos. We'd keep the original files, with the date and place the camera saved, and say plainly on the page which images are your own.
The same idea works for words. When a page names where a number came from and when it was checked, a reader can confirm it, and an AI tool that quotes the page has the source right there. It's why we name a source and a date for every number we publish.
If your pages make claims without saying where they come from, rewriting them with named, dated sources is part of how we make them worth quoting.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview described a verified history of a media file, citing the C2PA, the Content Authenticity Initiative, a federal research-integrity office, a university and vendors. ChatGPT gave a similar definition and named C2PA but cited no sources.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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