Over half of the internet is now AI slop

Futurism reported on a study by Graphite, an SEO firm, that analyzed 65,000 English-language articles published between January 2020 and May 2025. As of May 2025, 52% of new articles were flagged as AI-generated. That number was around 10% when ChatGPT launched in late 2022.

This number doesn't surprise me, and if you are familiar with the signs of AI writing, it's not likely to surprise you either.

There are a few caveats worth mentioning in this study.

The detection tool (Surfer) classified anything with 50%+ LLM-generated content as AI-generated, with a reported 4.2% false positive rate.

Paywalled sites also tend to block Common Crawl indexing, so a lot of human-written content isn't being counted. The real split is probably less extreme.

That said, 10% to 52% in two and a half years is wild. Growth apparently plateaued around November 2024, presumably because content farms may be catching on that search engines aren't rewarding slop the way they used to.

The slop doesn't win because it's good. It wins because creating posts that target certain keywords is a walk in the park, so there's an ocean of it.

If you've actually worked through what you want to say, you're part of a shrinking minority. As time goes on, I suspect this will be cause for respect on the part of your readers.