According to the latest research report, about half of the new articles online are generated by artificial intelligence. This study was released by the SEO company Graphite and analyzed 65,000 English articles published between January 2020 and May 2025. To evaluate whether these articles were written by AI, the research team used an AI detection tool called Surfer. Any article that was determined to have more than 50% of its content generated by a large language model was considered AI-generated.
Image source note: The image is AI-generated, and the image licensing service provider is Midjourney
Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the number of AI-generated contents has shown a rapid upward trend. According to the report data, the proportion of AI-generated articles increased from about 10% at the end of 2022 to over 40% in 2024, and then the growth rate slowed down. By May 2025, the proportion of AI-generated articles reached 52%, which is equivalent to the number of articles written by humans, showing a balanced situation between both sides.
More reassuringly, the proportion of AI articles seems to have reached a plateau. After reaching a peak in November 2024, the proportion of AI and human-written articles has been hovering around 50%. In addition, researchers pointed out that the actual proportion of human-written articles may be higher, because many paid websites have started to block Common Crawl (an open-source dataset) from indexing their pages. This means that some human-written content may have been excluded from the analysis.
It should be noted that the accuracy of AI detection tools is also questionable. When testing Surfer, Graphite found that it mistakenly classified 4.2% of manually written articles as AI-generated, while incorrectly identifying 0.6% of AI-generated articles as human-written. Therefore, although the number of AI-generated articles is increasing, human-written articles still dominate in search engines and chatbot responses.
The reason for the stagnation of AI article numbers is currently unclear. According to Graphite's second report, AI content generators may have realized that low-quality AI-generated content has limited exposure on search engines, so more articles are now being created by humans. Data shows that 86% of articles in Google search are written by humans, while only 14% are AI-generated.
Today, more and more writers are using AI chatbots and other tools in their creative processes, blurring the line between machine-generated content and human-created content. As Professor Stefano Soatto from the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles said: "At this point, the relationship between machines and humans is more like a symbiotic relationship rather than a simple opposing relationship."
Key points:
🌐 Over 50% of new articles are generated by AI, indicating a significant change in content creation methods.
📈 The growth of AI-generated content has reached a plateau, and the proportion of human-written articles may be underestimated.
🤖 The boundary between human-created and AI-generated content is gradually blurring, forming a new symbiotic relationship.
