Key Takeaways

• The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the web.
• However, the proportion of AI-generated articles has plateaued since May 2024. Despite the prevalence of AI-generated articles on the web, we show in a separate study that these 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
• Our study did not evaluate the prevalence of AI-generated / human-edited articles, and they may be even more prevalent.

Motivation

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, many companies have explored publishing content generated by LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to grow their traffic across channels such as Google Search, social, and advertising. This is a cost-effective alternative to spending hundreds of dollars for humans to write content. The quality of AI content is rapidly improving.  In many cases, AI-generated content is as good or better than content written by humans (MIT Study). It is often hard for people to distinguish whether content is created by AI (Originality AI Study). We seek to evaluate the prevalence of AI-generated articles.

Results

We find that in November 2024, the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of human-written articles. We observe significant growth in AI-generated articles coinciding with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. After only 12 months, AI-generated articles accounted for nearly half (39%) of articles published. The raw data for this evaluation is available here.

‍

‍

AI-generated Article Growth Has Plateaued

While AI-generated articles grew dramatically after ChatGPT launched, we do not see that trend continuing. Instead, the proportion of AI-generated articles has remained relatively stable over the last 12 months. We hypothesize that this is because practitioners found that AI-generated articles do not perform well in search, as shown in a separate study.

Methodology

Common Crawl

Common Crawl maintains one of the largest publicly available web archives. It provides billions of URLs and is used by researchers and developers, and is a key data source for training large language models.

‍

Selection of Articles

We need a representative sample of English-language articles on the web. To do so, we randomly select 65k URLs from CommonCrawl, and confirm that each is in English, has an article schema markup, is at least 100 words, has a publish date between January 2020 and May 2025, and is an article or listicle as classified by the Graphite page type classifier.

‍

AI Detection Algorithm

Accurate detection of AI-generated content is required to make claims about the prevalence of AI-generated articles on the web. There is a considerable disagreement about the accuracy of AI detection algorithms, and many argue that detecting AI is impossible, or at best, highly inaccurate. Many companies offer AI detection algorithms, including Originality.ai, GPTZero, Grammarly, and Surfer. To compute the percentage of AI-generated content in an article, we use the same algorithm described in our 2024 whitepaper, but classify each chunk using Surfer’s AI detector with a chunk size of 500 words. We classify an article as AI-generated if the algorithm predicts that more than 50% of the content is AI-generated, and human-written otherwise. Before classifying the articles in our data set, we evaluate the accuracy of Surfer’s AI detection algorithm.

Limitations

eee

‍

‍

‍