Media: AI, human-generated articles now roughly equal online

A new analysis from SEO firm Graphite suggests that the number of online articles generated by artificial intelligence briefly surpassed human-written content but now stands at a roughly equal level, according to Axios.

Researchers have long warned that if AI-produced content dominates the internet, large language models could eventually “choke on their own exhaust,” potentially undermining their effectiveness.

According to Graphite, the proportion of AI-generated articles surged following the launch of ChatGPT in 2023. Analysing 65,000 URLs posted between 2020 and 2025, the study found that AI-written content briefly overtook human articles in November 2024. Since then, the volumes have stabilised, remaining broadly similar.

Graphite’s analysis relied on Surfer, an AI-detection tool, to classify pages as either AI- or human-written. Articles were marked as AI-generated if Surfer estimated that 50% or less of the content was human-authored. The tool demonstrated a 4.2% false positive rate and a 0.6% false negative rate when tested with known samples.

Despite the growth of AI articles, human-written material continues to lead in search engine visibility. Graphite found that 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were authored by humans, with only 14% generated by AI. Similarly, among content cited by chatbots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, 82% was human-written, while 18% was AI-generated. AI articles that do appear tend to rank lower than their human counterparts.

Determining the exact proportion of AI content remains difficult. Many articles involve human-AI collaboration, making it challenging to categorise content definitively. “At this point, it's a symbiosis more than a dichotomy,” said Stefano Soatto, computer science professor at UCLA and VP at Amazon Web Services. A Google spokesperson emphasised that not all AI-assisted content is considered spam.

The analysis drew from Common Crawl, a large, open-source web archive, which forms a key part of training datasets for AI models. However, some paywalled sites block indexing, potentially underrepresenting human-written content in the dataset.

Graphite CEO Ethan Smith noted that clearly labelled AI summaries of proprietary content perform well in search, whereas auto-generated summaries often do not. A recent Pew survey supports this: only 20% of users find AI-generated summaries in search highly useful, and a mere 6% report high levels of trust in them.

While AI continues to shape online content creation, human authors remain central to search visibility and credibility. Analysts emphasise the ongoing “symbiosis” between AI tools and human expertise, rather than a wholesale replacement.

By Aghakazim Guliyev