Key Takeaways
- •74.2 percent of new web pages contained AI-generated content in Ahrefs' April 2025 study of 900,000 pages.
- •Only 2.5 percent of new pages are pure AI with no human editing, while 25.8 percent remain fully human-written.
- •AI-generated articles first outnumbered human-written ones in November 2024 and have plateaued at roughly half of new articles since.
- •17.31 percent of Google's top 20 results were AI-generated in September 2025, up from 2.27 percent in 2019.
- •86 percent of articles that actually rank in Google Search are human-written despite AI's publishing volume.
- •87 percent of content marketers use AI in content creation, but 84 percent of companies never disclose it.
- •No AI text detector reached 80 percent accuracy in independent academic testing, and OpenAI shut down its own classifier after it caught just 26 percent of AI text.
- •Google's March 2024 core update cut low-quality, unoriginal content in results by 45 percent.
- •Only 11 percent of UK news consumers are comfortable with mainly AI-produced news.
- •Pages ranked number 1 in Google are human-written 80.5 percent of the time, per Semrush's analysis of 42,000 posts.
How Much New Content Is AI-Generated
Most new web pages now contain at least some AI-written text, but fully automated content remains rare, and the growth curve has flattened since 2024.
- 01
74.2 percent of 900,000 newly created English-language web pages contained AI-generated content in Ahrefs' April 2025 study.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
- 02
Only 2.5 percent of new pages were pure AI with no human editing, while 25.8 percent were purely human-written and 71.7 percent mixed both.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
- 03
November 2024 was the month AI-generated articles first outnumbered human-written ones on the web, according to Graphite's analysis of Common Crawl data.
Source: Graphite, 2024
- 04
51.7 percent of sampled articles were AI-generated as of May 2025, up from 2.2 percent in January 2020, in Graphite's study of 65,000 Common Crawl URLs.
Source: Axios (Graphite data), 2025
- 05
The AI share of new articles has held roughly flat since May 2024, suggesting the first explosive wave of adoption has cooled.
Source: Axios (Graphite data), 2025
AI Content in Google Search Results
AI-written pages appear in Google results far more than in 2019, yet human-written content still wins the positions that matter most.
- 06
17.31 percent of the top 20 Google search results were AI-generated as of September 2025, per Originality.ai's ongoing tracking of 500 keywords.
Source: Originality.ai, 2025
- 07
19.56 percent was the all-time high for AI content in Google's top 20 results, recorded in July 2025, up from just 2.27 percent in February 2019.
Source: Originality.ai, 2025
- 08
AI content in Google's top 20 jumped from 11.46 percent in September 2024 to 18.07 percent by November 2024, one of the sharpest rises in the tracking period.
Source: Originality.ai, 2024
- 09
86 percent of articles ranking in Google Search were human-written and only 14 percent AI-generated, despite AI articles making up about half of new publishing.
Source: Graphite, 2025
- 10
80.5 percent of position 1 results in a Semrush analysis of 42,000 blog posts were human-written, versus about 10 percent AI-generated.
Source: Semrush, 2026
- 11
10.4 percent of pages cited in Google AI Overviews were themselves AI-generated, per an Originality.ai study.
Source: Originality.ai, 2025
- 12
45 percent less low-quality, unoriginal content appeared in Google results after the March 2024 core update finished rolling out, beating Google's own 40 percent target.
Source: Search Engine Land, 2024
Marketer Adoption of AI Writing
AI-assisted writing is now standard practice among marketers, but most teams keep humans in charge and few disclose the AI's role.
- 13
87 percent of 879 content marketers surveyed by Ahrefs said they use AI to create or help create content.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
- 14
64 percent of SEO teams use a human-led, AI-assisted workflow, the most common production model in Semrush's survey of 224 SEO professionals.
Source: Semrush, 2026
- 15
72 percent of surveyed SEOs believe AI content ranks at least as well as human-written content, a perception Semrush's ranking data contradicts at position 1.
Source: Semrush, 2026
- 16
84 percent of companies do not disclose their use of AI in published content, according to Ahrefs survey data.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
- 17
4.7 times less is what AI-generated content costs to produce compared with human-created material, per Ahrefs.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
- 18
70 percent of SEOs cite speed as the top benefit of AI content, while only 19 percent report improved content quality.
Source: Semrush, 2026
AI Content Detection Accuracy
Detection tools are unreliable enough that even OpenAI shut down its own classifier, and independent testing finds no tool clears 80 percent accuracy.
- 19
26 percent of AI-written text was all OpenAI's own AI text classifier could correctly identify, and it falsely flagged human writing 9 percent of the time.
Source: OpenAI, 2023
- 20
July 20, 2023 was the date OpenAI quietly shut down that classifier, citing its low rate of accuracy.
Source: OpenAI, 2023
- 21
None of 14 tested AI text detectors reached 80 percent accuracy, and only 5 surpassed 70 percent, in the Weber-Wulff academic evaluation of 12 public tools plus Turnitin and PlagiarismCheck.
Source: International Journal for Educational Integrity, 2023
- 22
Detection tools skew toward labeling text as human-written rather than catching AI text, and simple paraphrasing or obfuscation made their performance significantly worse.
Source: International Journal for Educational Integrity, 2023
Reader Trust and the AI Slop Problem
Audiences remain skeptical of machine-written material, and clicks are already falling as AI answers absorb attention that used to reach publishers.
- 23
7 percent of people globally use AI chatbots for news each week, rising to 15 percent among under-25s, across 48 markets in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025.
Source: Reuters Institute, 2025
- 24
Only 11 percent of UK respondents were comfortable with news produced mainly by AI, versus 44 percent in India, showing wide geographic gaps in acceptance.
Source: Reuters Institute, 2025
- 25
Respondents expect AI to make news less transparent (net -8), less accurate (net -8), and less trustworthy (net -18), per the Digital News Report 2025.
Source: Reuters Institute, 2025
- 26
34.5 percent fewer clicks go to the top-ranking page when a Google AI Overview is present, according to an Ahrefs study.
Source: Ahrefs, 2025
How to Cite This Page
APA: Best AEO Tools. (2026). AI-Generated Content Statistics 2026. Retrieved from https://bestaeotools.com/statistics/ai-generated-content-statistics
MLA: "AI-Generated Content Statistics 2026." Best AEO Tools, 2026, https://bestaeotools.com/statistics/ai-generated-content-statistics.
Chicago: Best AEO Tools. "AI-Generated Content Statistics 2026." Accessed July 2026. https://bestaeotools.com/statistics/ai-generated-content-statistics.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ahrefs found 74.2 percent of 900,000 newly published pages in April 2025 contained at least some AI-generated text, though only 2.5 percent were pure AI. Counting whole articles, Graphite found AI-written pieces passed human-written ones in November 2024 and made up 51.7 percent of new articles by May 2025. Both studies agree the growth has flattened rather than accelerating.
Sources
Every statistic on this page links to the publication where the number appears. Data comes from 11 sources.
- Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/what-percentage-of-new-content-is-ai-generated/
- Graphite: https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans
- Axios (Graphite data): https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/ai-generated-writing-humans
- Originality.ai: https://originality.ai/ai-content-in-google-search-results
- Semrush: https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-ai-content-rank-in-search-data-study/
- Originality.ai: https://originality.ai/blog/ai-overview-ai-citations-study
- Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/google-march-2024-core-update-rollout-is-now-complete-438713
- Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-statistics/
- OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/
- International Journal for Educational Integrity: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40979-023-00146-z
- Reuters Institute: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025/dnr-executive-summary
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