AI Overviews Cite AI-Generated Content More Than Human Writing

Keywords Explorer and extracted the top three cited links. 1.9 million URLs in total, of which we had 500,000 in our database.

We ran each URL through our own AI content detector, which is part of Page Inspect in Site Explorer.

Here’s what our content detector found:

• 3.6% of pages cited in AI Overviews were categorized as “pure AI.”
• 8.6% were categorized as “pure human.”
• 87.8% were categorized as a mix of two.

Of the ones that were a mix of both human and AI:

• 11.2% showed minimal AI use (1-10% of the page content was categorized as AI)
• 44% showed moderate AI use (11-40%)
• 24.7% showed substantial AI use (41%-70%)
• 7.9% showed dominant AI use (71%-99%)

These findings become even more striking when compared to our previous research on AI content across the web. In our analysis of 900,000 new pages, we found that:

• 2.5% of pages were categorized as “pure AI.”
• 25.8% were categorized as “pure human.”
• 71.7% were categorized as a mix of the two.

Even though this research looked only at new pages (and not all cited URLs in AI Overviews will be new), this suggests that Google’s AI Overviews might show a bias toward citing AI-generated or AI-assisted content compared to the general distribution of content on the web.