Charted: AI Articles Have Overtaken Human-Written Ones
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Key Takeaways
- AI-generated articles rose from 2.2% of sampled articles in January 2020 to 51.7% in May 2025.
- Graphite estimates AI-written articles first surpassed human-written ones in November 2024.
- The study looked at 65,000 English-language URLs from Common Crawl and classified articles as AI-generated when more than half the text was flagged as AI-written.
AI-written articles have gone from a small share of the web to a majority of sampled articles in just five years.
This visualization is part of Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo. It visualizes monthly data from Graphite, which studied 65,000 English-language URLs from Common Crawl and tracked how the share of AI-generated articles changed between January 2020 and May 2025.
When AI-Written Articles Passed Human-Written Ones
In January of 2020, 97.8% of written content analyzed by Graphite was written by humans, with just 2.2% written by AI. One year after ChatGPT’s launch, in November 2023, AI-written content had risen to make up 39%.
The data table below shows the estimated share of sampled published web articles classified as human-written versus AI-generated over time from January 2020 to May 2025:
| Month | Human Content | AI Content |
|---|---|---|
| January 2020 | 97.8% | 2.2% |
| February 2020 | 97.7% | 2.3% |
| March 2020 | 98.0% | 2.0% |
| April 2020 | 97.4% | 2.6% |
| May 2020 | 97.9% | 2.1% |
| June 2020 | 98.1% | 2.0% |
| July 2020 | 97.7% | 2.3% |
| August 2020 | 97.6% | 2.4% |
| September 2020 | 96.8% | 3.2% |
| October 2020 | 96.9% | 3.1% |
| November 2020 | 97.0% | 3.0% |
| December 2020 | 97.3% | 2.7% |
| January 2021 | 98.0% | 2.0% |
| February 2021 | 97.0% | 3.0% |
| March 2021 | 97.1% | 2.9% |
| April 2021 | 96.7% | 3.4% |
| May 2021 | 97.2% | 2.8% |
| June 2021 | 96.1% | 4.0% |
| July 2021 | 97.0% | 3.0% |
| August 2021 | 95.7% | 4.3% |
| September 2021 | 98.4% | 1.6% |
| October 2021 | 95.2% | 4.8% |
| November 2021 | 98.6% | 1.4% |
| December 2021 | 96.4% | 3.6% |
| January 2022 | 95.0% | 5.0% |
| February 2022 | 93.4% | 6.6% |
| March 2022 | 94.9% | 5.1% |
| April 2022 | 95.1% | 4.9% |
| May 2022 | 95.2% | 4.8% |
| June 2022 | 93.8% | 6.2% |
| July 2022 | 94.4% | 5.6% |
| August 2022 | 92.8% | 7.2% |
| September 2022 | 90.4% | 9.6% |
| October 2022 | 91.9% | 8.1% |
| November 2022 | 92.3% | 7.8% |
| December 2022 | 89.0% | 11.0% |
| January 2023 | 84.0% | 16.0% |
| February 2023 | 83.7% | 16.3% |
| March 2023 | 79.3% | 20.7% |
| April 2023 | 74.5% | 25.5% |
| May 2023 | 69.6% | 30.4% |
| June 2023 | 67.2% | 32.8% |
| July 2023 | 60.8% | 39.2% |
| August 2023 | 61.0% | 39.0% |
| September 2023 | 64.1% | 35.9% |
| October 2023 | 60.2% | 39.9% |
| November 2023 | 61.0% | 39.0% |
| December 2023 | 55.4% | 44.6% |
| January 2024 | 54.6% | 45.4% |
| February 2024 | 58.9% | 41.1% |
| March 2024 | 54.8% | 45.3% |
| April 2024 | 59.0% | 41.0% |
| May 2024 | 57.3% | 42.7% |
| June 2024 | 58.1% | 41.9% |
| July 2024 | 55.5% | 44.5% |
| August 2024 | 52.4% | 47.6% |
| September 2024 | 52.6% | 47.4% |
| October 2024 | 51.4% | 48.6% |
| November 2024 | 48.9% | 51.1% |
| December 2024 | 45.5% | 54.5% |
| January 2025 | 44.9% | 55.1% |
| February 2025 | 48.6% | 51.4% |
| March 2025 | 48.7% | 51.3% |
| April 2025 | 52.7% | 47.3% |
| May 2025 | 48.3% | 51.7% |
According to Graphite, AI-generated articles eventually surpassed human-written ones in November 2024, marking a major turning point in web publishing. As of May 2025, AI-written articles accounted for 51.7% of Graphite’s sample, slightly above the human-written share.
A Plateau After Rapid Growth
While AI-written content grew quickly, the trend has leveled off more recently. Graphite found that the proportion of AI-generated articles has remained relatively stable since May 2024, suggesting that the first wave of explosive adoption may have cooled.
Importantly, this does not mean most web traffic goes to AI-written content. Graphite notes that publishing volume and audience visibility are different measures, and AI-generated articles appear less visible in Google and ChatGPT than their prevalence in published articles suggests.
How Articles Were Classified
Graphite split each article into 500-word chunks and used Surfer’s AI detector to estimate how much of it was AI-written. An article was labeled AI-generated if more than 50% of its content was flagged as AI-written.
This study focused specifically on English-language articles and listicles, not all online content. To be included, URLs had to have article schema markup, contain at least 100 words, and have publish dates between January 2020 and May 2025.
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