Overview
- SEO firm Graphite estimates that about 52% of new web articles are AI-generated, with a peak near 55% in January 2025 before stabilizing.
- A Five Percent white paper analyzing content from 2020 to May 2025 also finds a plateau after AI output overtook human writing late last year.
- Both studies rely on Surfer’s detector, which Five Percent says produced an implied 4.2% false-positive rate on presumed-human articles and flagged 99.4% of GPT-4o outputs as AI.
- Graphite contends AI-written pieces perform poorly in search and often do not surface in Google or ChatGPT, with Dataconomy citing only about 14% of Google’s highest-ranked results identified as AI.
- Researchers caution that evolving model quality and detector limits make precise shares uncertain, even as post-ChatGPT adoption drove the initial surge.