The internet has crossed a watershed moment: artificial intelligence now generates or assists in creating the majority of new content published online, according to multiple industry studies, marking a fundamental shift in how digital information is produced and consumed.
Recent analysis from SEO firm Graphite shows that as of May 2025, around 52% of new web articles contain AI-generated content, while Ahrefs’ study of 900,000 English-language pages found that 74.2% of those created in April 2025 included AI-written material.
The rapid ascent of machine-generated content represents one of the most dramatic technological transformations in internet history, fundamentally altering the economics of content creation and raising profound questions about authenticity, quality, and the future of human creativity.
The ChatGPT Effect: A Timeline of Transformation
The proliferation of AI content accelerated sharply following the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, with the percentage of AI-generated articles jumping from roughly ten percent in late 2022 to over 40 percent by 2024. The growth trajectory peaked in November 2024 before stabilising at current levels.
Earlier projections proved prescient: a 2022 report from Europol estimated that 90% of online content would be generated by AI by 2026. While that prediction now appears overstated, the actual figures remain striking.
Industry experts attribute the explosive growth to the democratization of AI tools. Generative AI has become integrated directly into everyday platforms including Google Docs, Gmail, Slack, Grammarly, LinkedIn, and other widely-used applications, making AI assistance nearly unavoidable for content creators.
A survey of 879 content marketers conducted by Ahrefs revealed that 87% admitted to using AI to either create or assist in content creation, with only 13% reporting they do not use AI at all.
The Quality Question: Does AI Content Rank?
Despite widespread adoption, questions persist about whether AI-generated content can compete with human-created material in search engine rankings. Recent research suggests the answer is more nuanced than many expected.
Analysis by Graphite found that 86% of articles ranking in Google Search were written by humans, with only 14% generated by AI.
The pattern held across AI chatbots as well, with 82% of articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity authored by humans and just 18% AI-generated.
However, this doesn’t indicate algorithmic discrimination. An Ahrefs analysis of 600,000 pages across 100,000 keywords found that most top-ranking content includes some AI input, with only 13.5% being purely human-written, while 81.9% of pages offered a blend of AI and human input.
Separate research examining 20,000 blog URLs found that 57% of AI content and 58% of human content ended up in the top 10 search results, meaning they have essentially the same likelihood of ranking on page one.
Google has been clear about its position. The search giant doesn’t penalise AI content per se, but rather prioritises quality regardless of creation method.
The company’s 2025 Search Quality Rater Guidelines emphasized that pages where nearly all content is AI-generated with little original human input should receive the lowest ratings.
The Plateau Effect: Has AI Content Hit Its Peak?
After AI-generated articles hit a peak in November 2024, the share of newly-published AI and human-written content has been hovering around a fifty-fifty split, with the share of new AI articles at 52 percent as of May 2025.
Several factors may explain this stabilisation. Content farms appear to be learning that AI-generated content isn’t prioritised by search engines and chatbot responses, leading some publishers to recalibrate their strategies.
Additionally, the distinction between “AI-generated” and “human-written” content has become increasingly blurred. Researchers told Axios that a definitive count of AI-made content isn’t possible with today’s tools and definitions, as it’s hard to determine what content is AI-generated versus human-generated.
The analysis used an open source dataset called Common Crawl, but because AI firms used this data to train their models, many paywalled websites have started blocking Common Crawl from indexing their pages.
Economic and Creative Implications
The AI content revolution carries significant economic implications. Projections indicate AI is expected to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with content creation representing a major component of that growth.
By 2025, AI might eliminate 85 million jobs but create 97 million new ones, resulting in a net gain of 12 million jobs. The content creation industry sits at the epicenter of this transformation, with writers, marketers, and publishers navigating a rapidly evolving landscape.
Graphite estimates that more than 10 billion new AI-generated pages have been published since 2023, representing an unprecedented volume of machine-created content that affects everything from search engine optimization to AI model training.
Beyond Text: AI’s Expanding Digital Footprint
While text content dominates current discussions, AI’s influence extends across multiple content types. As of March 2025, approximately 71% of images on social media platforms are created using AI technologies, indicating that visual content generation is following a similar trajectory.
The prevalence of deepfake-related fraud attempts has risen to 6.5%, underscoring both the sophistication of AI-generated media and the challenges it poses for content authentication and trust.
Trust and Transparency Challenges
The proliferation of AI content raises fundamental questions about transparency and trust in digital information. A Pew survey found that only 20% of users say AI summaries in search are extremely or very useful, and only 6% say they trust them a lot.
The challenge extends beyond search engines to the broader information ecosystem. How do readers distinguish between content based on genuine human experience and material generated by algorithms trained on existing data?
The answer remains uncertain, though industry leaders are exploring solutions including content watermarking and disclosure requirements.
Industry Response: Adaptation Over Resistance
Rather than fighting the AI content tide, successful publishers appear to be adapting their strategies. Industry analysts describe the current moment as “a symbiosis more than a dichotomy,” with the most effective publishers integrating AI into human workflows rather than replacing them outright.
This hybrid approach leverages AI for efficiency while maintaining human oversight for creativity, fact-checking, and brand voice—a combination that appears to satisfy both search algorithms and human readers.
Analysis tracking AI content in Google search results from 2019 to 2025 found that in February 2019, just 2.27% of the top 20 Google search results were AI-generated, jumping to 19.56% in July 2025, before settling to current levels.
MIT Study Finds Readers Prefer AI-Written Content Over Human-Written
In a surprising twist for the creative industry, new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found that readers prefer AI-generated writing over content produced by professional human writers.
The study compared advertising product descriptions and persuasive ad copy created under four conditions: entirely by humans, entirely by AI, human-written then edited by AI (“Augmented AI”), and AI-written then edited by humans (“Augmented Human”).
Results revealed that AI-generated content — especially when edited or finalised by AI — consistently outperformed human-written pieces in reader preference.
Notably, even when readers were informed that the text was created by AI, their preference for AI-authored content remained unchanged.
Looking Ahead: An Evolving Equilibrium
The stabilization of AI content at roughly half of all new publications suggests the industry may be reaching a new equilibrium rather than racing toward complete AI dominance.
The quality ceiling for purely automated content, combined with search engine preferences for human expertise and experience, appears to be creating natural limits on AI’s reach.
Yet the technology continues evolving. As AI models improve and detection becomes more difficult, the lines between human and machine-generated content will likely blur further.
The question may shift from “Is this AI?” to “Does this serve readers effectively?”—a standard that transcends authorship.
For now, the internet exists in a hybrid state: part human, part machine, and increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two.
Whether this represents a temporary transition or a permanent new reality remains to be seen, but one thing is certain—the age of purely human-generated web content has definitively ended.
