Health Check: The Tool Authors Keep Coming Back To
Ghostproof has 30 production tools. Health Check is used three times more than any of them. Here is why.
The chapter is finished. Maybe you wrote it. Maybe AI wrote most of it and you polished the rest. Maybe you are not sure which parts are which any more. You need to know how it reads before anyone else sees it.
That is what Health Check does. Paste the text. Get back a diagnostic table. Instantly.
What it reports
Word count and structure metrics. Total words, sentence count, average sentence length, paragraph count. The numbers you need for pacing analysis without opening a spreadsheet.
AI fingerprint density. How many of the 265+ known AI prose patterns appear in your text, expressed as a frequency per thousand words. A manuscript at 0.3 per thousand words is clean. One at 4.7 needs work. The number gives you a target to drive down.
Pattern frequencies. Specific counts for the most common AI tells: em dash chains, perception filters, body-emotion sync constructions, hedged metaphors, narrator editorialising, reductive labels, scene-ending summaries. Not vague flags. Exact counts with the specific phrases identified.
Critical violations. The patterns that would make a reader stop trusting the prose. A critical violation is not a style preference. It is a construction that reads as obviously machine-generated to anyone paying attention. Health Check flags them separately from minor patterns so you know what to fix first.
The full report generates in seconds. Not minutes. Seconds. Paste 3,000 words and get back a complete diagnostic before you finish reaching for your coffee.
Why it is the most popular tool
We built 30 tools into the Ghostproof engine. Chapter generation. Beat sheets. Voice DNA extraction. Blurb generators. Query letter writers. KDP keyword optimisers. The full pipeline from first idea to published book.
Health Check is used more than all of them. By a factor of three.
The reason is simple. Generation is exciting but infrequent. Most authors generate a chapter, then spend time with it. They revise, they polish, they read it back. Health Check fits into every stage of that process. Generate a chapter, run Health Check. Polish a paragraph, run Health Check. Get feedback from a beta reader, revise the section, run Health Check. It is the tool that answers the question authors ask most often: is this good enough?
How authors actually use it
One bestselling thriller author on the platform has never generated a single chapter with Ghostproof. She uses Health Check, Voice DNA, and Deep Clean exclusively on manuscripts she wrote herself. The editorial engine is her quality audit on prose that was never AI-generated in the first place. She pastes a chapter, reads the diagnostic, fixes what it flags, and moves to the next one.
That usage pattern was not planned. We built Health Check as a pre-publication quality gate for AI-assisted fiction. Authors turned it into a general-purpose manuscript diagnostic. The tool is sharper than expected because the 265 rules were built to catch AI fingerprints specifically, and it turns out those same patterns overlap heavily with the prose weaknesses that make any writing feel generic.
Em dash overuse is not exclusively an AI problem. Perception filters appear in human first drafts. Flat sentence rhythm is universal. The engine catches all of it, regardless of whether a machine or a person produced it.
Health Check vs the free homepage audit
The free audit on the Ghostproof homepage runs a simplified version. It scans for the top AI patterns and gives you a score out of 10. Good for a quick check. Not comprehensive.
Health Check, available inside the dashboard, runs the full 265-rule engine. Pattern-by-pattern breakdown. Frequency analysis. Critical violation flags. Specific phrases quoted. The difference between a temperature reading and a full blood panel.
The other editing tools
Health Check diagnoses. The rest of the editing suite treats.
Deep Clean targets 14 AI fingerprint patterns simultaneously across a full manuscript and removes them surgically, with before-and-after counts for every fix. Voice DNA extracts your prose fingerprint from a sample and locks it into the generation engine so every AI-assisted word sounds like you wrote it. Check My Writing runs a full editorial audit and AI rewrite in one pass. AI Fingerprint Audit scores each paragraph individually on a Low/Medium/High/Very High scale with specific reasoning.
Five editing tools. Health Check is where most authors start because it answers the first question: what am I dealing with? The rest of the suite answers the second: what do I do about it?
Try it
The free homepage audit runs instantly, no account needed. For the full Health Check with the 265-rule engine, create a free account. Twelve generations included. No credit card.
Run the audit now
Paste your text on the homepage for a quick score. Or create a free account for the full Health Check diagnostic.