TLDR: A recent study by SEO firm Graphite reveals that the volume of AI-generated articles on the internet surpassed human-written content in November 2024. However, despite this quantitative dominance, AI-produced articles largely fail to rank well in search engines like Google and are rarely cited by AI assistants, indicating a plateau in their growth due to poor performance.
New research from SEO firm Graphite indicates a significant shift in online content creation, with the quantity of articles generated by artificial intelligence surpassing those written by humans. The study, which analyzed over 65,000 English-language URLs from the Common Crawl archive, found that by November 2024, AI-generated content accounted for more than half of newly published articles on the open web. This marks a pivotal moment, highlighting the increasing adoption of AI tools in digital publishing.
The surge in AI-authored content closely followed the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Within just 12 months, AI-generated articles rapidly grew to nearly 40% of all published content. However, this rapid expansion appears to have hit a ceiling. Graphite’s findings show that the proportion of AI-generated articles has plateaued since May 2024. Researchers hypothesize that this slowdown is primarily due to the poor performance of AI-generated content in search engine rankings.
Indeed, a companion report by Graphite on search and large language models revealed that search engines still heavily favor human-written content. Approximately 86% of the top-ranking pages in Google Search are human-authored, with only 14% being AI-generated. Similarly, AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity also show a preference for human content, citing human-made articles 82% of the time compared to just 18% for AI-generated ones. This suggests that while AI can produce content at scale, it has not yet achieved the impact or visibility of human-created work.
The study utilized Surfer’s AI content detector, classifying an article as AI-generated if 50% or more of its content was identified as AI-written. The researchers acknowledged the limitations of their detection methods, estimating a false positive rate of 4.2% (human-written content incorrectly identified as AI) and a false negative rate of 0.6% (AI-written content incorrectly identified as human).
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This transformation in authorship models underscores how content creators are increasingly leveraging AI to reduce costs and accelerate production. However, this often comes at the expense of quality and, crucially, visibility. The study concludes that despite AI’s quantitative dominance in content creation, it has yet to surpass humans in terms of impact and effective reach to the average reader.
