The basics
Seedance is the video generation model family developed by ByteDance and served through its ModelArk (方舟) platform — Volcengine in China and BytePlus internationally. It generates short video clips from text prompts, images or reference material. The family spans multiple generations and tiers: the current Seedance 2.0 series includes the flagship model plus faster and lighter variants (often labelled fast and mini), and it sits alongside Seedream, ByteDance's image generation family.
Seedance became one of the most widely used video models of 2026 for a practical reason: distribution. Beyond ByteDance's own creative tools, ModelArk licenses the model to third-party platforms via API, so the same engine powers video features inside many apps that never mention the name Seedance.
Where you actually encounter Seedance
Most Seedance videos do not come from an official ByteDance app. Creators use it through third-party AI video platforms — Higgsfield, Pollo, Renoise, Krea, Freepik and many others integrate Seedance among their model options, sometimes as the default. That means a clip labelled with a platform's brand may still be a Seedance artifact underneath. Our platform leaderboard aggregates community checks to show how often videos submitted from each platform test positive for official Seedance signals.
How to check whether a video was made with Seedance
Since July 2026, ModelArk offers an official artifact verification API: it analyzes a video for technical signals embedded during official generation and, on a match, returns the model name (such as doubao-seedance-2-0). This site wraps that API into a free checker — upload a file or paste a link on the detector and you get the official verdict in one to two minutes.
Three boundaries to keep in mind: the API covers the Seedance/Seedream family only (not Sora, Kling or Runway), it verifies artifacts generated within roughly the last 30 days, and heavy re-encoding can remove the signals it depends on. A negative result never proves a video is human-made. For the full review process, see how to tell whether a video was generated by Seedance.