Study finds AI now writes more web articles than humans
3 Min Read
AI now writes more web articles than humans, but most remain unseen due to poor SEO and reader preference for human content.
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A computer screen in English teacher Casey Cuny's classroom shows ChatGPT during class at Valencia High School in Santa Clarita, California, on August 27, 2025. (AP/Jae C. Hong)
More new articles online are now written by artificial intelligence than by humans, according to a recent study from Graphite. Using data from the Common Crawl archive, the researchers found that AI-generated web content surpassed the 50% mark of newly published English-language articles in November 2024. Although that share has plateaued in recent months, it represents a fundamental shift in how digital content is produced and who is producing it.
The study analyzed 65,000 URLs containing article markup and publication dates between 2020 and 2025. It used AI-detection tools to classify content as AI-generated or human-written based on whether more than 50% of the text matched AI writing patterns.
The researchers acknowledged limitations in their detection methods, estimating a false-positive rate of 4.2% and a false-negative rate of 0.6%.
Surprisingly, while AI-written articles now dominate in quantity, most remain invisible to the average reader. The majority of these pieces perform poorly in search engine rankings and rarely appear in ChatGPT responses or on Google results, both of which continue to favor human-authored content.
The rise in machine-written content closely follows the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Within just one year, AI authorship of online articles surged from near zero to nearly 40%. Although growth has slowed, the transformation in authorship models is undeniable. This shift highlights how content creators, from media outlets to clickbait farms, have increasingly embraced AI to cut costs and accelerate production, often at the expense of quality.
SEO challenges keep AI writing in the shadows
Despite the explosive volume, most AI-generated articles lack the quality and structure required for effective SEO. As a result, they fail to gain organic visibility. Google has publicly stated it deprioritizes low-quality AI content, contributing to the continued dominance of human-written material in search results.
Publishers using AI tools often generate what the study calls a "bland slurry" of repetitive content. These articles may be fast and cheap to produce, but they rarely engage readers or meet the standards of platforms and algorithms.
The study’s authors suggest the market may be starting to correct course. Since May, the share of new articles classified as AI-written has remained flat. Publishers could be reassessing their dependence on AI, shifting toward hybrid models that balance automation with human input. Meanwhile, AI-detection tools continue to improve, and platforms publishing poor-quality AI content may face increased penalties, both from search engines and from audiences that can tell the difference.
While the internet may now be a co-authored space between humans and machines, the study makes one thing clear: readers still prefer human writing. Despite the cost and speed advantages of AI, it is the human voice, nuanced, original, and thoughtful, that continues to resonate.
