This is the broadest content judgement in the set: depth, structure, readability, answer-friendliness and trust, combined into one number. It sits in the middle of the dataset, and that position is informative — most published content is neither obviously thin nor genuinely thorough. It is adequate, which is the hardest state to improve from, because nothing about it is visibly broken.
Here is where that sits. The median is 64/100, which ranks it 14 of the 25 measures in this dataset. The middle half of results falls between 56 and 72 — a band 16 points wide. That is wide: sites genuinely diverge here, which is to say getting ahead is still possible.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 999 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. Most results sit in the middle bands, which means sites differ here by degree rather than by whether they bothered at all.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | AI Content |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 1% · 7 |
| 20–39 | 7% · 72 |
| 40–59 | 29% · 290 |
| 60–79 | 52% · 523 |
| 80–100 | 11% · 107 |
| Total runs | 999 |
The grade mix
The same data as letters: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64 and F below 50.
Where your score stands
The number is worth less here than the breakdown beneath it, because five dimensions averaging to the middle can hide a page that is excellent at four of them. Look at which dimension is lowest and start there. A page that scores well across all five is genuinely rare, and usually the result of someone treating the page as a piece of work rather than a slot to fill.
| Tool | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Content | 42 | 56 | 64 | 72 | 80 | 62.7 | 5 | 95 |
How to read it: 56 is bottom-quartile, 64 is a typical page, 72 starts the upper quartile and 80 or above is the top 10%. These thresholds apply to this tool only.
The checks that fail most
The failures split between what the page contains and what it demonstrates. Containing — a summary, headings, lists, adequate length — is fixable in an afternoon. Demonstrating — a named author, a date, sources, original phrasing — requires a decision about how the site publishes, not just how this page is laid out.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Summary / TL;DR | 94% | Partial |
| Reasonable reading ease | 83% | Partial |
| Freshness date | 80% | Partial |
| Author signal | 74% | Partial |
| Substantial length | 60% | Partial |
| Question-based sections | 49% | Partial |
| Structured data | 43% | Partial |
| Clear sentence length | 32% | Partial |
| Exactly one clear H1 | 29% | Partial |
| Lists / tables | 19% | Partial |
| Original, varied wording | 10% | Partial |
| Paragraph structure | 10% | Partial |
“Hard fail” means the check’s full weighting is lost; “partial” means only part of the score is. Rates are the share of scans in which the check ran and did not pass.
The weakest areas
This tool groups its checks into categories. The chart below shows how often each category was the lowest-scoring one in a scan — which area is most often the weak link. It is not the average score in that category; it is how often it came last.
“Trust (E-E-A-T)” was the weakest area in 58% of scans.
What to fix first
Add the trust signals first, because they are the cheapest of the five dimensions and the most often missing entirely. A byline, a publish date and an update date are three lines in a template. Then work on depth, which is the slowest to move and the only one that cannot be faked.
A typical scan passes 9.9 of 16 checks and leaves 6.1 open items behind. What drags a score down is usually not one catastrophe but accumulated small omissions.
Run the AI Content Score on your own page
Month by month
The figures on this page are replaced at every refresh. At the end of each month a permanent edition is published for that month and never edited again — which is the only reason this series can be compared at all. One edition has been published so far; when the second lands this section will set the two months side by side.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 64 | baseline | 11% | 6.1 | 999 |
Frequently asked questions
Does this detect AI-generated content?
No, and it does not try to. It measures qualities that make content useful — specificity, structure, attribution, depth — which AI-generated text can perfectly well have and human-written text can perfectly well lack. The question it answers is whether the content is worth relying on, not who or what produced it.
Is longer content better?
Only insofar as length is a side effect of covering a subject properly. Length on its own is the easiest thing to fake and one of the least useful signals, which is why the checks look at whether the page answers questions, cites sources and covers subtopics rather than simply counting words. A short page that answers the question completely beats a long one that circles it.
Why does originality of phrasing matter?
Because a page assembled from the same sentences as twenty others gives an engine no reason to prefer it, and gives a reader nothing they could not get elsewhere. It is also the clearest available proxy for whether anybody actually thought about the subject before publishing on it.
What is a good score on the AI Content Score?
In this dataset the median is 64/100, so scoring 64 puts you exactly in the middle. 72 is the start of the upper quartile and 80 or above is the top 10%; below 56 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 measures in this dataset have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing.
Which check fails most often on the AI Content Score?
“Summary / TL;DR”, which did not pass in 94% of scans. None of this tool's checks are scored as hard fails; every one of them loses partial credit instead.
Questions that govern the whole series — how the sample is collected, how sites are anonymized, how often the figures are refreshed — are answered in the methodology on the hub.
Using this data
The figures, tables and charts on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation: SeoMods — AI Content Score benchmarks, 2 September 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/ai-content-score. If you need to cite by date, use the August 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.