Are Half Of All Online Articles Really AI-Generated?

Published: October 30, 2025

By India McCarty

If it feels like everything you see online these days isn’t real, don’t worry — you’re right. A new report has found that over half of the internet’s content right now is AI-generated.

“The quality of AI content is rapidly improving,” a study conducted by SEO firm Graphite reported, acknowledging that “in many cases, AI-generated content is as good or better than content written by humans” and can be “hard for people to distinguish” from real content.

In their study, Graphite found that around 52% of newly published articles on the internet are AI-generated, as of May 2025. However, these numbers aren’t quite what they seem.

Related: Is the AI Boom Stalling?

More than half of all online articles are now being generated by AI. Crazy. pic.twitter.com/YVQUPqPyKh

— Nanalyze (@nanalyzetweets) October 27, 2025

To analyze these articles, Graphite used a site called Common Crawl, which gathers online articles — but excludes any that are behind paywalls, which most online news sources use.

There is also the fact that Surfer, the tech tool used to detect AI content, isn’t always accurate. In fact, Surfer labeled human writing as AI 4.2% of the time. While this statistic isn’t huge, it still presents a significant potential for throwing off the study’s overall data.

Complicating matters further is the increased connection between humans and the AI tools they use. When working in tandem, it can be difficult to qualify which articles are truly AI-generated, or simply got a helping hand from ChatGPT.

Should AI be used to write articles?

“At this point, it’s a symbiosis more than a dichotomy,” Stefano Soatto, a professor of computer science at UCLA and vice president at Amazon Web Services, told Axios of the relationship between humans and AI.

AI-generated content is getting more and more difficult to identify. A recent study conducted by the Oxford University Press found that over half of 2,000 students, aged 13 to 18, found it “difficult” to tell whether or not something was real.

Dan Williams, a teacher in the UK, said, “Some [students] are using it really effectively and are using it as a personal tutor and getting that help. But many are copying and pasting from the AI. They do not yet have that bank of knowledge and experience to test whether something is correct or not.”

However, UOP’s Dr. Alexandra Tomescu explained that AI can be beneficial to kids, saying, “When asked, actually nine out of 10 students have said that they have benefitted from AI, especially in skill development.”

While Graphite’s study findings seem alarming at first glance, the statistics aren’t exactly rock-solid. AI-generated content is more and more common, but you don’t need to worry about everything you see being fake — yet.

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