The first battle between humans and AI was always going to play out on the internet, and a new report has been keeping score.
In late 2024, AI was briefly responsible for more published articles on the open web than humans, according to new research conducted by SEO firm Graphite. While that shift strikes at the heart of researchers’ worst fears, the report shows a slight reset with human and AI articles now roughly 50-50.
Graphite analyzed 65,000 English-language URLs from the open source database Common Crawl and used Surfer’s AI content detector to identify the writing source of articles or listicles published between January 2020 and May 2025. An article was labeled AI-generated if 50% or more of its content was identified as written by AI.
The results were startling: As of November 2024, 50.3% of new web articles were generated primarily by AI. However, before the dawn of ChatGPT, that number was just 5%.
Human writing still matters
Despite the surge in automation, search engines still favor a human touch. Graphite’s companion report on search and large language models found that “86% of the top-ranking pages in Google Search are still human,” compared to “only 14% that are AI-generated.” Among AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity, the ratio is nearly identical: 82% human to 18% AI.
That gap suggests large-scale generative publishing has hit a ceiling. “The share of AI-generated articles has plateaued since May 2024,” Graphite’s researchers noted, “as publishers and SEO teams discover that algorithmic volume doesn’t guarantee visibility.”
Rather than a full takeover, Graphite describes the moment as a rebalancing of the content ecosystem. “It’s becoming a symbiosis more than a dichotomy,” said Alex Svanevik, a contributor to the company’s Five Percent research series. “The most effective publishers are integrating AI into human workflows rather than replacing them outright.”
Visibility vs. volume
Even with the scales evenly balanced, AI writing is reshaping the digital content ecosystem. Graphite estimates that more than 10 billion new AI-generated pages have been published since 2023. This veritable tsunami of machine-generated prose could significantly augment data quality for everything from SEO to model training, echoing the analysts’ fears that the snake will indeed choke on its own tail.
If visibility continues to be the metric by which content is valued, it’s fair to hope that substance will win out over volume. As the report concludes: “AI may have surpassed humans in content creation, but it has not yet surpassed them in impact.”
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