How do I check content for plagiarism for free?

Start with a free search: put a distinctive sentence in quotation marks into Google, which finds exact copies anywhere it has indexed, and Google Scholar does the same for academic papers. For a whole document, Quetext's free plan checks up to 1,000 words, and Grammarly's plagiarism checker compares your text against billions of web pages. To find out whether your own website's pages have been copied elsewhere, Copyscape is built for that job. For a thesis or paper in India, use your university's checker (many use DrillBit or Turnitin), because free tools search far less of the published literature; UGC's 2018 regulations treat similarity up to 10% as minor with no penalty, with penalties rising above that. A similarity score is not a verdict: quotes and references that are properly cited count as matches too, so read what was matched. Rule: a quoted search for a sentence, Quetext for a document, your university's tool for anything you submit.