AI Content vs. Human Content: What Google Indexes
AI now writes a large part of the web. And many site owners worry about the same thing: will Google even index a page written by AI?
We checked. We took 5,498 pages from 2,319 websites that IndexCheckr users added in 2026, ran every page through an AI detector, and compared the result with whether Google had indexed the page.
The short answer:
About two in three pages were written by AI.
Google indexed them just as often as pages written by people.
Here are the details.
How we detected AI: every page in this study was checked with Pangram‘s AI detector. We’d like to thank Pangram for generously providing $5,000 worth of free credits for this research.
Chapter 1: Two in Three Pages Are Now Written by AI
We sorted every page into one of three groups:
- Human-written: the detector found no sign of AI.
- AI-written: the text was generated by an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
- Mixed: part of the page was written by AI, or a person’s text was rewritten or edited with AI.
Key Findings
- 68% of pages were written by AI. That’s about two out of every three pages.
- Only 18% were written entirely by people. That’s fewer than one in five.
- The other 15% were a mix of human and AI writing.
Detailed Breakdown
Here is the same split for pages in English and pages in other languages:
| Who wrote the page | English pages | Pages in other languages | All pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human-written | 16.3% | 21.3% | 17.6% |
| Mixed (AI-assisted) | 15.4% | 12.9% | 14.8% |
| AI-written | 68.2% | 65.7% | 67.6% |
| Total | 100% | 100% | 100% |
AI writing is just as common outside English. In both groups, about two in three pages were written by AI.
Analysis
AI writing tools have become cheap, fast and good enough that many site owners now use them for most of their content.
Keep in mind who these site owners are. They use an index checker, so they care about SEO and publish new pages often. They are probably quicker to adopt AI than the average website. So this is a picture of active SEO websites in 2026, not of the whole web.
Chapter 2: Site Owners Are Split
Behind the average, users behave very differently. For every user with at least 5 pages in the study, we worked out how much of their content was written by AI.
Key Findings
- 31% of users had almost all of their pages written by AI (90% or more).
- 14% of users had no AI pages at all.
- The median user had 59% of their pages written by AI. (If you line up all users from least to most AI, the median is the one in the middle: half of users use more AI, half use less.)
Detailed Breakdown
We also looked at how often Google had indexed the pages of each group of users:
| How much of the content is AI-written | Share of users | Their pages indexed (average per user) |
|---|---|---|
| No AI pages | 14% | 73% |
| Some AI (under half) | 25% | 56% |
| Mostly AI (50% to 89%) | 30% | 69% |
| Almost all AI (90% or more) | 31% | 45% |
Only the last group really stands out. The other three don’t follow a clear pattern, and the gaps between them are within the normal ups and downs of groups this size.
Analysis
There is no single way site owners use AI. Some have handed almost all of their writing to AI. Others don’t use it at all. Most sit somewhere in between, mixing AI pages with pages they write themselves.
Websites made almost entirely of AI content had fewer pages indexed: 45% on average, against 73% for users with no AI pages. On a given website, though, Google indexed AI and human pages equally (see Chapter 3), so it isn’t judging pages one by one on who wrote them.
There are two possible explanations, and our data can’t tell which one is right. Either these websites were weaker to begin with, or Google trusts a website less when nearly everything on it is mass-produced.
Chapter 3: Google Indexes AI Pages Just as Often
This is the question that matters most: does Google treat AI pages differently?
Key Findings
- Human-written pages: 69% indexed.
- AI-written pages: 69% indexed. Practically the same.
- Mixed pages: 76% indexed, slightly more than the other two groups.
Detailed Breakdown
Here is everything Google did with these pages when we checked:
| Who wrote the page | Pages checked | Indexed | Page not indexed | Whole website not indexed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human-written | 970 | 68.7% | 30.9% | 0.4% |
| Mixed (AI-assisted) | 812 | 75.9% | 23.8% | 0.4% |
| AI-written | 3,716 | 69.4% | 30.1% | 0.5% |
Almost none of these pages were on a website that Google had removed completely, whoever wrote them.
Same Website, Different Author
A fair objection: maybe the websites that use AI are simply different from the ones that don’t. Bigger, older or better known websites get indexed more easily, whoever writes their pages.
So we also compared AI pages and human pages on the same website. 175 websites had both. On those websites, Google had indexed 68% of the human-written pages and 66% of the AI-written ones.
That gap of about 1 point is too small to tell apart from chance. Whichever way we ran the numbers, the difference between AI and human pages never went beyond a few percentage points in either direction.
Caveat
Most pages in this study were checked once, usually within a few days of being added to IndexCheckr. So these numbers show whether a page was indexed at that moment. And being indexed is not the same as ranking well: it only means Google can show the page in its results.
Analysis
This matches what Google itself says. Google has stated that it rewards helpful content however it is produced, and that what it targets is content made mainly to manipulate search results.
In other words, Google doesn’t ask “was this written by AI?” when it decides whether to index a page. It asks the same questions as always: can it find the page, is the website trustworthy, and is the page worth showing?
That doesn’t make AI pages safe by default. Google’s spam policies cover mass-produced pages with little value, whether a person or an AI wrote them. A website that publishes thousands of thin pages can still lose its indexing. But AI on its own did not make pages less likely to be indexed in our data.
Chapter 4: What This Means for You
Here is what our data means in practice, one point at a time.
1. AI Won’t Stop Your Pages From Being Indexed
In our data, Google indexed 69% of AI-written pages and 69% of human-written ones. On the same website, the two did equally well.
What to do
- Use AI if it helps you publish. On its own, it won’t keep your pages out of Google.
- If a page isn’t indexed, look for the usual causes instead: weak internal links, a page missing from your sitemap, thin content or a technical block. Our guide to Google indexing issues covers 13 of them.
2. Don’t Build a Whole Website on AI Alone
Websites made almost entirely of AI content had 45% of their pages indexed on average, against 73% for websites with no AI pages.
What to do
- Use AI for outlines, drafts and first versions.
- Add what only you can: your own experience, examples, data and opinions.
- Publish fewer, better pages rather than many thin ones.
3. Check Which Pages Google Actually Indexed
About 3 in 10 pages weren’t in Google when they were checked, whoever wrote them.
What to do
- Don’t assume a page is indexed just because it’s published.
- Check new pages a few days after publishing them.
- Check your important pages in bulk rather than one by one in Google.
4. Check Again After a Few Weeks
A page that isn’t indexed today may be indexed in a few weeks. And a page that is indexed today can drop out later.
What to do
- Recheck pages that weren’t indexed a few weeks after publishing.
- Keep an eye on your most important pages over time, so you notice if one disappears from Google.
5. Help Google Find Your New Pages
Google can only index a page it knows about.
What to do
- Link to every new page from at least one existing page on your website.
- Make sure new pages appear in your sitemap.
- Links from other websites help Google discover your pages faster.
6. Remember That Indexed Is Only the First Step
Indexed means Google can show your page. It doesn’t mean the page will rank.
What to do
- Once a page is indexed, judge it on its rankings and traffic.
- Mixed pages, where people edited AI drafts, were indexed at least as often as the rest. Time spent improving AI output is well spent.
Tools That Help
Two of our tools do the checking and tracking for you:
Want to know how your own pages and backlinks compare? See our study Your Pages vs. Your Backlinks: What Google Indexes.
How We Did This Study
The Pages
We used pages that IndexCheckr users added between June and October 2026. We only used pages on users’ own websites and left out the backlink pages they track. IndexCheckr doesn’t label which is which, so we told them apart using heuristics (simple rules based on how each project’s pages are spread across websites). We kept pages with at least 250 words of text and took up to 8 pages per website. That gave 5,498 pages from 2,319 websites and 278 users.
Detecting AI
We used the AI detector from Pangram on the first 450 words of each page, as it was online in October 2026. Before running the study, we tested the detector ourselves. On 1,189 pages saved by the Internet Archive before ChatGPT existed, it flagged none as AI. On 348 texts written by 10 different AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, it caught 347.
What “Indexed” Means
For each page, IndexCheckr searched Google for that exact page. If Google showed it, the page counted as indexed. Most pages were checked once, soon after being added.
Privacy
We only looked at totals. No website, page or user is named in this study.
Keep in Mind
These are pages our users chose to track, mostly on websites that are active in SEO. They are not a random slice of the whole web.