You’re not imagining it. The internet’s been feeling a little…off lately. Like every other article was ghostwritten by a toaster. That’s because a growing chunk of online content actually is machine-made — and now we have the receipts.
According to a new report from SEO firm Graphite, highlighted by Axios, about 52 percent of newly published articles on the internet were generated by AI as of May 2025. That means more than half the web’s fresh content is coming from large language models like ChatGPT.
The findings come from a scan of 65,000 English-language articles published between January 2020 and May 2025. Using an AI-detection tool called Surfer, Graphite flagged any article that was at least 50 percent machine-generated.
The spike in AI slop was fast and steep. Before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, AI-made content was barely 10 percent. But it quickly surged — passing 40 percent in 2024 and peaking in November of that year. Since then, the split between human and AI content has hovered close to 50/50, occasionally flipping back and forth. As of the latest report, the bots are narrowly in the lead.
Still, the true numbers might tilt more human. Graphite’s data came from Common Crawl — a massive public dataset that excludes paywalled or crawler-blocked sites like The New York Times. And those missing articles are almost certainly written by people, Axios notes.
There are also limits to the detection itself. In testing, the Surfer tool falsely labeled human writing as AI 4.2 percent of the time. But it almost never mistook AI for human — just 0.6 percent of the time.
So why the plateau?
One theory: Google and AI chatbots aren’t rewarding bot-written content anymore. A second Graphite report found that 86 percent of articles ranking in Google search were human-written, while only 14 percent came from AI. Chatbots like Perplexity and ChatGPT also overwhelmingly cite human-sourced pages. So content farms might be realizing their auto-generated sludge isn’t surfacing — and slowing production.
That doesn’t mean the bots are backing off. If anything, the line between AI and human-written content is getting harder to draw as writers mix the two in their workflows. As Axios puts it, we’re moving from a competition to a collaboration, whether we like it or not.