74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages)

ahrefs.com

8 points·jankydev··6 comments

Okay, we're talking content marketers and SEO people here (yuck), but still, I can believe these figures being at least ballpark accurate.

I believe most publishers are still using human writers although the are obviously all getting their ideas from the same source. It's hard to find any 'lifestyle' content that doesn't have 100 or so similar versions.

Around 15 years ago I employed an journalist to write unique articles for a wedding site project - it was all copied by bigger sites who easily outranked us. A lot f this content was 'ever-green' and is still around to this day.

I learned not to spend so much money on content after this point. I guess most other people did too - hence the general lack of quality.

Ironically, these sites are now complaining about regurgitated AI content. I find it hard to sympathise.

Lately, even reputable legacy publishers are farming out search bait listicles to AI. It's all quite depressing. Though I do get your point. LLMs are only making existing problems (much) worse.

'According to our AI Content Detector'

I used to employ a writer who was very good but, over time, I could see patterns and phrases that were uniquely hers - her fondness for the word juxtapose became a bit of joke.

The benefit of using AI, aside from the obvious cost-saving, is that I can filter out this stuff without worrying about causing offence

Are you talking about replacing the writer with AI or using it as a kind of sub-editor? If the former, isn't LLM generated material chock full of repeating patterns and phrases? That's how it looks to me, anyway.

Replaced her entirely. My point really was that human writers are not immune to pattern-like output.

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