* A Further 22% Of Results Contained Substantial Signs of AI Assistance In Writing Giving A Total of 34% Where Some AI Involvement Was Likely (up 6% from January).
* Just 66% Of The Top 'Your Money/Your Life' Results On Google Remain Highly Likely Written by Humans
* Of The 'Uncertain' Sites Manual Review Of The AI Data Revealed Significant Use of AI To 'Finish Articles' or 'Hit Word Counts' With Many Conclusions Scoring 80%+ On The AI Detector.
* The top 3 results showed more certain AI results at 14% but less 'uncertain' results at 12% for a total of 26% AI impact on content.
“I think this ongoing study will be a bit of a 'canary in the coalmine' for content creators. Either Google will push back against AI generated content and we'll see the prevalence of AI content in the top positions decline.
Or, as AI improves, we'll see more AI content be seen by Google as more valuable than human content and this percentage will grow. In a way it's not surprising to see writers utilise AI tools to finish up a piece, or hit word counts, and overall I wonder how much it really takes away from the value of the final work. Only time will tell.”
Steve Brownlie - ConfuseTheMachine.com
Methodology: AI content tools have existed long before ChatGPT (Jasper and many more). We took some mainstream finance and health keywords and ran all the articles on the first page of Google through Originality.ai (currently the most accurate AI content detector) to determine the likelihood that AI content was ranking in top positions on Google for 'your money/your life' (YMYL) keywords which are often the most valuable/important to be accurate.
This is the January 21st 2024 update and first running of this report. It will be updated and expanded monthly to provide insights into the ever changing prevalence of AI content in our search results. The full raw data is available to journalists - please email sdbrownlie@confusethemachine.com for a copy from your work email.
This research is released freely and all images and findings can be shared without restriction. Please exercise fair use and link to this page so your readers can review the original report.
Manual Review Process
Inspecting the results manually in Originality.ai we found that in many cases contiguous chunks of otherwise 'uncertain' articles were picked up at 90%+ likely to be AI generated.
This showed that even for sites where the articles were being substantially written by humans, there were also entire sections and most commonly conclusions/closing sections that were detected as being almost certainly from a ChatGPT or similar AI writing assistant. This gave us reasonable confidence that the total use of AI likely extends to over a quarter of sites that rank on the first page of Google for these key terms, however we decided to break it out into two categories in line with the overall results for the article as in these cases AI assistance was more evident than full AI generation of the entire article.
