Overview
- Graphite’s review of 65,000 web articles found AI output briefly topped human work in November 2024, then settled into near parity through May 2025.
- The study sampled Common Crawl URLs from 2020–2025 and labeled a page as AI-generated when Surfer detected at least 50% model-written text.
- Human-written pages continue to dominate distribution channels, with 86% of top Google Search results and 82% of chatbot citations coming from human-authored articles.
- Measurement remains uncertain due to detector limits and blended workflows; Graphite reported a 4.2% false-positive rate and 0.6% false-negative rate in Surfer tests, and Google notes the human–AI line is increasingly blurred.
- Coverage gaps may undercount human work because some paywalled sites block Common Crawl, and a recent Pew survey found only 20% of users rate AI search summaries as very useful and 6% trust them a lot.