Humans Strike Back: Study Finds AI-Written Articles No Longer Outnumber Real Writers on the Web

The robots had their moment, but humans are clawing back. A new analysis shows that AI-generated writing briefly overtook human-written content online — before leveling off.

The report from Axios cites research by Graphite, which analyzed over 65,000 URLs and found that while machine-made articles once dominated, the web’s human pulse is steady again at around 50%.

Why? Search engines have learned to sniff out soulless text. Graphite’s study revealed that 86% of top-ranking Google pages are human-written.

Even chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity seem to prefer citing humans, referencing them more than 80% of the time.

It’s a sign that authenticity still matters — not just to readers, but to the algorithms that shape what we see.

This shift mirrors broader moves in the industry. Marketers are starting to focus on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — crafting content designed to be quoted by AI tools rather than merely ranked by search.

A recent Demand Gen Report showed that 35% of brands now prioritize GEO over traditional SEO.

If that sounds like jargon fatigue, it’s because the entire marketing world is scrambling to adapt to AI-driven discovery.

Still, the picture isn’t black and white. Google itself acknowledges that human-AI collaboration is blurring the lines, calling it “a symbiosis more than a dichotomy.”

That statement echoes a 2022 Europol estimate predicting that 90% of online content would soon be AI-made — a forecast that now looks, well, overly dramatic.

There’s also growing unease about the ethics of AI authorship.

The Demand Gen Report on whether machine-generated works can hold copyright may redefine what “authorship” even means.

If machines can’t own what they create, does that push publishers back toward human writers — or just force them to disguise their AI more cleverly?

Either way, the message is clear: the novelty of automated prose is wearing off.

Readers, search engines, and even bots seem to crave something only humans can still consistently deliver — a bit of unpredictability, a spark of imperfection, maybe even a heartbeat behind the words.