Data last checked: 7 Oct 2026 · updated weekly
ChatGPT launched on 30 Nov 2022. Since then, AI labs have started publishing how much text their models process. This page puts those disclosures on one timeline, converted to words per day, against the commonly cited estimate of all human word output.
Upper-bound reading. Google counts tokens processed (prompts, context and outputs, including images and audio), not only text written out. Converted at ~0.75 words per token.
Each line is a company's own figure, converted to words/day. Lines aren't additive: they overlap, and they measure slightly different things. The jump is 4 to 5 orders of magnitude in about three years.
Each gridline is 10× the one below. On linear scale, everything before 2025 flattens to zero, which is itself the story.
Reasoning models and agents burn far more tokens per request than 2023 chatbots. Part of the rise is more work per question, not only more users.
Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, xAI and self-hosted open models publish few or no comparable numbers, so true global volume is higher than any single line.
Graphite sampled English-language articles from Common Crawl and ran them through AI detectors. AI-written articles rose fast after ChatGPT, crossed 50% around November 2024, then flattened.
Graphite links the flattening to AI articles performing poorly in search. In its companion study, about 86% of top Google results were human-written.
Detectors have false positives and miss human-edited AI drafts. Treat the line as a trend, accurate to a few points.
Chart 1 counts words generated in chats and apps. Most never reach the public web, which is why one can grow 1000× while the other holds at half.
| Date | Source | As disclosed | Words / day |
|---|
Conversion: monthly ÷ 30.4, weekly ÷ 7, then × 0.75 words per token. Figures already stated in words are used as-is. Raw data: data.json.
Public figures put it in the tens of trillions. Google alone reported 3.2 quadrillion tokens a month in May 2026, about 77 trillion words a day. That counts prompts as well as replies, so it is an upper bound.
About 100 trillion words a day, spoken and written, across everyone on Earth. The estimate comes from OpenAI's Sam Altman in February 2024.
Graphite's Common Crawl study found mostly AI-written articles reached about half of new English web articles by late 2024, and the share has held near 50% since.
In English, one token is about three quarters of a word, or roughly four characters. This site converts every token figure at 0.75 words per token.