How Much of the Web is Being Written by AI?

Intuitively, we know that more AI-generated content is seeping into our feeds, but can it be quantified? 

As part of a quest to find out, we recently partnered with Graphite.io, a research-driven growth agency focused on SEO, content, and answer engine optimization, on a new study of AI-written content across the web. 

They found that “AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans”, and you can read the full piece here. 

Graphite has been tracking this trend over time, and their prior research found that the quantity of AI-generated articles surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the web – but the proportion of AI-generated articles has plateaued since May 2024.

From their most recent study, here are their key findings: 

• The number of articles published on the internet that are primarily AI-generated (50%) is equal to the number written by humans (50%).
• ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Within the first 12 months, the percentage of primarily AI-generated articles jumped to 36%, and reached 48% by 24 months.
• However, since Q1 2025, the percentage of primarily AI-generated articles has plateaued at roughly 50%. We previously published this finding with data up to May 2025, and new data confirms this trend.

Graphite builds on their prior research by using 3 different AI detectors (Pangram, GPTZero, Copyleaks). They independently evaluated each to show that the false positive rates and average false negative rates are consistently below 2%. Each AI detector shows a similar trend.

Their previous study estimated the proportion of primarily AI-generated articles to be 3.3 percentage points higher. This relatively small difference is the result of using the average of three AI detectors vs. only one previously.

Despite the prevalence of AI-generated articles on the web, they show in a separate study that these articles largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT. They do not evaluate whether AI-generated articles get as much traffic as human-written articles, but we suspect that they do not.

So what does this mean? For us, the major takeaway was that half of new articles online are now primarily AI-generated – and that is just a few years after ChatGPT launched. As to what this means a decade from now, we can only assume AI-generated content is going to grow. 

This is why preserving what’s human is at the core of our mission. While publishing more is becoming easier with the help of LLMs, publishing something worth saying is arguably only becoming more difficult.