Exclusive: The web is still mostly written by humans, study finds

Reproduced from Graphite.io; Chart: Axios VisualsNew articles generated by AI briefly outnumbered those written by humans online, but the two are now roughly equal, per a new report from SEO firm Graphite.Why it matters: Researchers have long feared that if AI-made content online overwhelms human-created material, large language models could choke on their own exhaust and collapse. The big picture: A 2022 report from Europol estimated that 90% of online content would be generated by AI by 2026.According to Graphite's analysis of 65,000 URLs that were posted online between 2020 and 2025, the percentage of AI-generated articles rose sharply after ChatGPT's launch in 2023.The percentage of AI-generated articles in this data set briefly surpassed human-written articles in November 2024, but the two have stayed roughly equal since. What they did: Graphite used an AI detector called Surfer to analyze a random sample of URLs from Common Crawl, an open source database of over 300 billion web pages. The database spans 18 years and adds 3–5 billion new pages monthly.The pages had publish dates between January 2020 and May 2025 and were classified as either articles or listicles using Graphite's article page type classifier. Articles were deemed AI-generated if 50% or less of the content was found by Surfer to have been written by a human.Zoom in: Distinguishing between machine and human-written content is tricky. To evaluate Surfer's accuracy, Graphite tested it with its own sample of AI-generated articles and with a set published before ChatGPT's launch, which were likely written by humans. Surfer had a 4.2% false positive rate (labeling human-written articles as AI-generated) and a 0.6% false negative rate (labeling AI-written articles as human) for articles it generated with GPT-4o.By the numbers: Content farms may also be learning that AI-generated content isn't prioritized by search engines and chatbot responses, according to a second report from Graphite.Graphite found that 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were written by humans, and 14% were generated by AI.The pattern held across chatbots too. 82% of articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity were written by humans, and only 18% were AI-generated, according to Graphite's research.When AI-generated articles do appear in Google Search, they tend to rank lower than human-written articles.Yes, but: Researchers told Axios that a definitive count of AI-made content isn't possible with today's tools and definitions.It's hard to determine what content is AI-generated and what is human-generated because humans are increasingly working together with AI.There are so many different degrees by which someone might utilize AI in their work that it's challenging to definitively say something is AI-generated or not, a Google spokesperson told Axios."At this point, it's a symbiosis more than a dichotomy," Stefano Soatto, professor of computer science at UCLA and VP at Amazon Web Services, told Axios. Not all content created with AI is considered spam, the Google spokesperson said.The intrigue: Common Crawl isn't the entire web, but it is one of the largest sources of training data for large language models.As a result, some paywalled websites — where content is presumably human-written — are blocking Common Crawl from indexing their pages.This could mean that the volume of human-written articles is even larger than what Graphite's data shows.What we're watching: Clearly labeled AI summaries of closed, proprietary content do well in search, Graphite CEO Ethan Smith told Axios.But it's a different story for AI summaries that are auto-generated by search engines.A Pew survey from last week found that enthusiasm for most AI summaries in search is modest: just 20% of users say those AI summaries are extremely or very useful, and only 6% say they trust them a lot.The bottom line: For now, humans still want to read content that is written mostly by humans.

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