- AI now writes the majority of newly published articles online, according to a study by Graphite
- Despite the volume, most AI-generated articles do not appear in Google search results or ChatGPT responses
- AI-written content seems to have plateaued this year
More new articles online are written by artificial intelligence than by humans, according to a new study from Graphite. Using Common Crawl data, Graphite found that AI-generated writing had passed the 50% mark for recently published web articles last November. That number has increased in recent months, but it’s still a big change in how content is produced.
The study relied on AI detection tools applied to 65,000 English-language URLs from the Common Crawl archive, filtering for content with article tags and publication dates from 2020 to 2025. They classified each article as AI-generated or human-authored based on whether over 50% of its content matched AI detection criteria. Not that the detector is perfect. The study’s authors estimated false-positive and false-negative rates of about 4.2% and 0.6%, respectively.
The survey may come as a surprise to many people because quantity is not the same as visibility. The study also found that despite the amount of AI-generated articles flooding the web, most are not good for SEO and do not show up often on Google or even in ChatGPT responses. Both tools still prioritize human-generated content, so most AI-authored articles go unnoticed by everyday readers.
The increase in typed content largely follows the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022. In twelve months, AI authorship of online articles went from virtually nothing to close to 40%. Things have slowed since then, possibly due to the underperformance of AI articles in search results.
Yet the robots are now surpassing their creators in terms of volume. The balance tipping toward AI represents how media companies, marketers, and clickbait content farms have sought ways to produce written content without the most expensive part, writers. The falling cost of high-performance AI tools only encouraged them. Each generation of models seems to offer faster speeds and lower prices than its predecessors.
Seemingly blind to the source of all successful writing, many have turned to AI models capable of churning out articles in seconds, churn being the apt description of the bland slurry that usually results. The often boring, repetitive and boring repetitive writing isn’t going to grab eyeballs organically, and Google has blatantly de-prioritised AI content in its search algorithm.
Internet AI flood
Yet they are slowly learning the futility of pursuing AI-only content creation. Graphite’s data shows that the percentage of new articles classified as AI-authored has remained unchanged since May. Publishers may be recalibrating how they use artificial intelligence, skipping full automation.
And while AI detection tools are imperfect, they are improving. Platforms that publish low-quality AI content may be penalized more aggressively by an audience that outright rejects what they produce.
The Internet can now be a co-authored space between humans and machines. But it is the human writing that people actually want to read.
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