The number of AI-generated articles on the web has skyrocketed since the launch of ChatGPT, surpassing the amount of human-generated work.
The number of AI articles on the web is slightly above 50%, according to a new report from SEO firm Graphite, which analyzed 65,000 URLs published between January 2020 and May 2025. Still, the rate of AI-generated content since ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022 is astonishing.
(Credit: Graphite)
Some minor good news is that the renaissance of robot ink seems to have plateaued since May 2024. Since then, some months have seen more human work, but the two are neck-and-neck.
Graphite does not explain the slowdown, especially since the number of ChatGPT users continues to grow; OpenAI now puts its weekly active user count at 800 million.
The idea that half of what we read on the web could be written by a robot is alarming, but how many humans are actually reading chatbot-produced content? Bad actors have turned to AI to crank out propaganda articles, as we saw last year with Iran. They are trying to flood the web with this content, so tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews regurgitate it to users.
In a separate study, Graphite said AI-generated articles largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT. “We do not evaluate whether AI-generated articles are viewed in proportion by real users, but we suspect that they are not,” it says.
Another caveat: Detecting AI content is notoriously difficult, so there could be false positives. Graphite pulled the URLs from Common Crawl, a large, publicly available web archive, and ran chunks of their text through a free AI detection tool called Surfer. It classified the articles as AI-generated if Surfer predicted more than 50% of the content came from an AI.
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The team tested Surfer’s chops by generating 6,009 phony articles using ChatGPT’s GPT-4o model, and seeing if it could detect them. Surfer correctly classified 99.4% of them as AI.
Still, there’s no denying the internet is trending toward more and more AI-generated content every day, especially with the launch of new tools like OpenAI’s Sora 2 in early October.
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