Most Perth business owners using AI to write their content have the same quiet anxiety sitting in the background. Is someone going to notice? Is Google going to penalise me? Am I about to get caught?
The honest answer is that being caught costs almost nothing. The damage comes from what business owners are doing because they are scared of it.
Anthropic now watermarks everything Claude writes. The trigger was European regulation, but Anthropic applied it globally because they had no way to limit it by region. A Perth business owner using Claude to write their content just had that change happen in the background, and nobody sent them a letter.
Meanwhile, 64 to 67% of long-form LinkedIn content is now AI-written. The feed feels exactly like that, and the posts still cutting through are the ones that cost the author something to write.
In Episode 22 of Raising The Bar, Mel Strutt and Monique Jecks cut through the anxiety, explain what the watermarks actually are, who can actually read them, and what a Perth business owner should genuinely be doing about this.
Key Takeaways:
- There are two watermarks and only one of them is going anywhere: The C2PA credential lives in the file metadata and disappears the moment you screenshot it. The invisible watermark lives in the words themselves, survives copy and paste, and a complete rewrite is the only thing that removes it. One is a warranty card in the box. The other is a serial number stamped in the metal.
- Google does not penalise AI content. It penalises low-quality content at scale: Sites publishing hundreds of unedited AI pages saw traffic drops of 50 to 80%. Sites publishing 50 to 100 quality AI articles with human editing saw traffic go up. The variable was quality control, not AI usage.
- The watermark removal tools are mostly scams: A wave of tools launched in August 2026 claiming to remove Claude’s watermark. Most of them delete invisible Unicode characters and market that as watermark removal, for a watermark whose own documentation says it adds no characters. People are paying money to remove something that was never there.
- Two in three Australian workers use AI at work and most use tools their employer has never approved: It is already happening in your business whether you have a policy or not. The Monday morning question is not about detection. It is about whether a human read every word before it went out.
- You can outsource the writing. You cannot outsource knowing your own industry: Verbatim AI output strips your tone and your brand starts sounding like everyone else’s, because it is coming out of the same handful of models. Your customers just stop recognising you.
Raising The Bar is a fortnightly podcast hosted by Mel Strutt, delivering blunt, experience-backed marketing guidance for Australian business owners. Joined by Monique Jecks, they address what matters, call out the fluff and raise the standard of what marketing must deliver for your bottom line.
