More than half of online content is AI-generated, new study says

AI may have just reached a tipping point in its conquest of written content. 

A new report from Graphite, a search engine optimization (SEO) company, shows that roughly 52% of all written content on the Internet was generated by some form of Artificial Intelligence. The study, which analyzed over 65,000 URLs between 2020 and 2025, shows that AI-written articles quickly rose in number following ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 but may be levelling out at just over half of all written content.

AI-generated written content overtook human-made articles briefly between late 2024 and early 2025 before falling back under half. Currently, the number of AI-generated articles stands at 52% of all articles on the Internet, according to the study. 

The good news is that search engines like Google seem effective at catching "AI slop" (or content created by AI) in their rankings; only 14% of content that ranked in Google searches was found to be AI-generated. Similarly, AI seems to favor human-written content in its own content generation. ChatGPT cited human-made articles 82% of the time, according to Graphite.

Largely, the study shows that fears of the AI domination of written content are (so far, at least) largely unfounded. While AI does make the majority of written content on the World Wide Web, it's a slim margin, and most search engines are good at sussing it out. Other studies have shown that humans largely see AI summarizations and other AI-generated content as less than useful, preferring articles written by flesh and blood people.

(No AI was used in the writing of this article.)