Growth Intelligence Brief #9

AI generated content is taking over, Microsoft's AEO tips, ChatGPT's search market share & more.

Oct 22, 2025

∙ Paid

Welcome to another Growth Intelligence Brief, where organic growth leaders discover what matters - getting insights into the bigger picture and guidance on how to stay ahead of the competition.

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Today’s Growth Intelligence Brief went out to 460 (+23) marketing leaders.

This week, we’re looking at how AI is reshaping the content ecosystem and what it means for your visibility:

More than half of content is now AI-generated, but search engines still favor human sources
Microsoft reveals specific optimization tactics for AI search visibility
ChatGPT’s search share is growing faster than anyone expected

I’ll also connect the dots on what this all means for you.

More than half of content is created by AI

Here’s what happened:

My friends over at Graphite published a report about AI-generated content, showing that less than half of content was created by humans. The team took 65k articles from Common Crawl and analyzed them with Surfer’s AI detector.

Why this news matters:

Of course, the driver of more AI content is the launch of ChatGPT. But interestingly, the amount of AI-generated content doesn’t continue to grow after November 2024. A second report from Graphite confirms that search engines and LLMs lean mostly on human-generated content. Maybe the AI detection capabilities decreased after November 2024?

My take on this:

There’s always a quality question when it comes to AI content. You can do it well, or you can do it sloppily, and I’ve found well-done AI content to perform… well!

There’s a more interesting point about this: Since the data is from Common Crawl, which is the largest source of training data for LLMs, we can assume that AI is already getting trained on AI. So far, it doesn’t seem like AI is cannibalizing itself. But, paradoxically, LLMs (and search engines) lean heavily on UGC. Reddit, Wikipedia, Linkedin, Youtube, Quora and others are usually among the top sources of citations and some of them are in training data. Creating AI content on these platforms is much harder but more important for AI Visibility.

Here’s what to do:

Audit your current content creation process to identify where AI-generated content makes sense and where human expertise is critical.
The more you can free capacity by leveraging AI for content, the more you can focus on platforms where AI tools are less prevalent: Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Quora. These UGC platforms carry more weight with LLMs and search engines.
Prioritize creating reference-worthy, data-driven content that becomes a source for AI models rather than competing with AI output.