Content written by generative AI has had a meteoric surge–but according to a new report, it seems to have levelled out.
Of the number of articles published on the Internet, the percentage of those written predominantly by AI now equals that of human-written content, according to new data from Graphite. The digital marketing agency used three different AI detectors to examine more than 55,000 randomly selected URLs to determine AI-generated content. The articles had to meet certain requirements like containing 100 or more words, and having a publish date between January 2020 and March 2026.
The details reported by Graphite are astonishing. Within the first 12 months after ChatGPT’s launch in 2022, the number of AI-generated articles on the Internet surged to 36 percent, then to 48 percent in the second year. But since about January 2025, that percentage of AI generated content has held steady around 50 percent.
Graphite also flagged a separate study from October 2025 that perhaps offers some context for the plateau. AI-generated content vastly underperforms human-written articles when it comes to search and discovery–meaning it might not be generating as much value as content created by an actual writer. According to the analysis, 86 percent of articles appearing in Google Search and 82 percent of those that appear on ChatGPT and Perplexity were written by people. Even when AI-generated content does appear, Graphite noted, it tends to rank lower.
An AI expert interviewed by Axios said that researchers have been concerned for some time that once AI models begin training on AI-generated content, it could contribute to a rise in low-quality content on the Internet.
“These models are smart because of all the information we put on the web that was created without these models,” UC Berkeley’s Dan Klein told Axios. “If we stop creating knowledge that is independent of these models, what’s going to fuel that?”
That said, Axios also noted that the quality of AI-generated writing has meaningfully improved, not to mention that it can be difficult to determine what constitutes AI writing. Whereas some content is mostly or entirely AI-generated, some writers use AI tools throughout the process of drafting and editing.
“While primarily AI-generated articles grew dramatically after ChatGPT launched, we do not see that trend continuing,” Graphite’s study reads. – Inc./TNS
