Nornic Register · Living document
“Half of all new content on the internet is AI-generated.”
The measurement is plausible and the same study reports that this content largely does not appear in search or assistant results — a finding the headline consistently drops.
The source
- Study
- AI vs Human Content Study
- Publisher
- Graphite
- Publication type
- Vendor research
- Sample
- Sampled new web articles, Q1 2026
- Fieldwork
- Q1 2026
- Funding & conflicts
- Graphite — a content and SEO company
- Verified on
- 2026-07-26
The arithmetic
The reported figure is 49.9% of newly published articles in Q1 2026 — articles, not "the internet". Video, images, code and private content are out of scope.
The same study concludes that this content "largely does not appear in Google and ChatGPT", and hypothesises that the share has plateaued precisely because AI articles do not perform.
So the honest reading is close to the opposite of the usual one: volume rose, visibility did not.
Detection of AI-generated text is itself unreliable, which caps the confidence of any measurement of this kind — including this one.
What would change this verdict
An independent measurement using a disclosed detection method and a defined sampling frame, or evidence that such content does rank at scale.
Sources