- AI Now Writes Most Newly Published Articles Online, Graphite Study Finds
- Despite the volume, most AI-generated articles do not appear in Google search results or ChatGPT responses.
- AI-written content appears to have plateaued this year
According to a new study from Graphite, more new online articles are written by artificial intelligence than by humans. Using data from Common Crawl, Graphite found that AI-generated writing had surpassed the 50% mark of newly published web articles in November last year. That number has plateaued in recent months, but it’s still a big change in the way content is produced.
The study relied on AI detection tools applied to 65,000 English URLs from the Common Crawl archive, filtering out content with article markup and publication dates from 2020 to 2025. They classified each article as AI-generated or human-written based on whether more than 50% of its content matched AI detection criteria. It’s not that the detector is perfect. The study authors estimated false positive and false negative rates of approximately 4.2% and 0.6%, respectively.
The study may surprise many people because quantity is not the same as visibility. The study also found that despite the volume of AI-generated articles flooding the web, most are not good at SEO and do not appear frequently in Google or even in ChatGPT answers. Both tools still prioritize human-created content, so most AI-written articles go unnoticed by everyday readers.
The increase in machine-written content is largely due to the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. In the span of twelve months, AI authoring of online articles went from virtually nothing to around 40%. Things have slowed down since then, possibly due to the poor performance of AI articles in search results.
However, in terms of volume, robots are now surpassing their creators. The scale tipping toward AI represents how media companies, marketers, and clickbait content farms have looked for ways to produce written content without the most expensive part: the writers. The falling cost of high-performance AI tools only encouraged them. Each model generation seems to offer faster speeds and lower prices than its predecessors.
Seemingly blind to the source of any successful writing, many have turned to artificial intelligence models capable of churning out articles in seconds, agitation being the appropriate description for the bland mix that usually results. The often dull, repetitive, and boring writing will not attract attention organically, and Google has openly deprioritized AI content in its search algorithm.
AI flood on the Internet
Still, they may slowly be beginning to understand the futility of engaging in AI-only content creation. Graphite data shows that the percentage of new articles classified as written by AI has remained stable since May. Publishers may be recalibrating how they use AI and skipping full automation.
And while AI detection tools are imperfect, they are improving. Platforms that publish low-quality AI content could be penalized more aggressively by an audience that outright rejects what they produce.
The Internet can now be a space for co-authorship between humans and machines. But what people really want to read is human writing.
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