Abstract : With the thriving of generative artificial intelligence, an unprecedented crisis of content authenticity is becoming real because any type of text, image, audio, and video can no longer be perceived as the work of humans. This is a systematic article on generative watermarking as an active paradigm of authentication that answers four research questions on the technical strategies, robustness, adoption and the future. Key discoveries include the fact that image watermarking has reached a high degree of maturity, with the most advanced systems recording 93% true positive rates and not degrading to under 38 dB compression at imperceptibility (PSNR). Nevertheless, text watermarking is susceptible, falling below 70% accuracy with paraphrasing attacks, and regeneration attacks lower all existing techniques to close to random detection. Regardless of the regulatory requirements on the implementation of watermarking by the European Union and China, only 38 percent of platforms apply verified watermarking. It concludes in the review that watermarking is not a sufficient tool and that multi-layered architectures between watermarking and provenance tracking, cryptographic signatures, and harmonized international standards are necessary to achieve effective content authentication.