Has AI-generated content stopped growing on the web?

Graphite's central claim is that the share of web articles it classifies as "primarily AI-generated" rose steeply after ChatGPT and has since stopped rising, sitting near half. The excerpt gives the series: 35.9% of articles published in the first 12 months after the November 2022 launch, 48% by 24 months, then a plateau. In Q1 2025 the split was 49.6% AI-generated to 50.4% human-written; Q4 2025 reached 50.9% AI before the share returned to 49.9% in Q1 2026. Graphite's own summary is that the AI-primary share "(50%) is equal to the number written by humans (50%)."

The count is Graphite's own, over 55.4k articles from a Common Crawl sample extended through March 2026. Because "there is considerable disagreement about the accuracy of AI detection algorithms," Graphite first checked false-negative rates, finding that "all detectors have low false negative rates, especially for GPT-5," tested on GPT-5, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. It then averaged three detectors (Pangram, Copyleaks and GPTZero) because "we do not rely on the accuracy of a single detector." An article counts as primarily AI-generated when a majority of its content is flagged (Pangram and Copyleaks) or when GPTZero's article-level prediction says so. The averaged figure runs 3.3 percentage points below Graphite's earlier estimates, on average. For the plateau, Graphite offers a hypothesis: practitioners "found that primarily AI-generated articles do not perform well in search," citing a separate study the excerpt does not include.

The nearest note on new websites measures something else. An Internet Archive sample of websites, read with a state-of-the-art detector, puts "roughly 35%" of newly published websites as AI-generated or AI-assisted by mid-2025 (How much of the internet is AI-generated now?). The two figures share a rough level and a post-2022 rise, but they count different units, use different samples and different detectors, so the excerpt gives no basis for treating them as one trend. The article count also has to rely on automated detection, because the excerpt notes that "it is often hard for people to distinguish whether content is created by AI," which is the gap Can humans detect AI text if machines can measure it? describes. The untested seam is mixed drafts: Graphite "did not evaluate the accuracy of AI detectors" on AI drafts that a human then edits. Do writers actually edit AI-generated text before publishing? suggests writers rarely edit AI text much. If that holds, most AI text reaches readers close to its generated form and the mixed-draft gap may matter less than it looks, though no source here tests that.

The excerpt does not establish several things. It reports false-negative rates only, so false positives, where a human article is flagged as AI, go unreported and would not appear in the figures. Detector accuracy is checked on three named models, and Graphite warns that newer models "may become harder to detect." Traffic is not measured either: Graphite does "not evaluate whether AI-generated articles get as much traffic as human-written articles," though it suspects they do not. The defensible claim is therefore narrower than the headline. In Graphite's measurements, using three averaged detectors on one sample, the primarily AI-generated share has held near 50% for five quarters. That is a stable measured line. It does not show what share of what people read is AI-written, and it does not show the web has stopped filling with AI text.