In this study, show that, despite the ubiquity of AI-generated content, it does not perform well in search and answer engines:
- 86% of articles ranking in Google Search are written by humans, and only 14% are generated using AI.
- 82% of articles cited by ChatGPT & Perplexity are written by humans, and only 18% are generated using AI.
- When AI-generated articles do appear in Google Search, they tend to rank lower than human-written articles.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, the number of articles generated by artificial intelligence on the Internet has increased dramatically, surpassing the amount of work created by humans. Even if they are not good perform in search engines, like Google.
According to a recent report by SEO firm Graphite, which analyzed 65,000 URLs published between January 2020 and May 2025, the amount of AI-generated content on the web is just over 50%. However, the amount of AI-generated content since ChatGPT debuted in November 2022 is staggering.
The good news is that the robot ink renaissance seems to have stalled since May 2024. There have been some months since then where human work has been more prevalent, but these two are pretty much the same.
Graphite doesn’t explain the slowdown, especially since ChatGPT’s user base continues to grow; OpenAI now claims that it has 800 million weekly active users.
In a separate study, Graphite said AI-generated articles largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT. “We do not evaluate whether AI-generated articles are viewed in proportion by real users, but we suspect that they are not,” it says.
However, it is undeniable that more and more AI-generated content is appearing online every day, especially with the introduction of new tools such as OpenAI’s Sora 2 in early October.
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