Content has a consumption capacity problem
The gap between content created and content consumed is one of the biggest problems in marketing that nobody is measuring.
👋 Hey, I’m George Chasiotis. Welcome to GrowthWaves, your weekly dose of B2B growth insights—featuring powerful case studies, emerging trends, and unconventional strategies you won’t find anywhere else.
This note is brought to you by Ahrefs.
I’ve been using Ahrefs for years. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is how we track visibility.
Now, I know there are a lot of tools popping up for AI search. (We counted 200+ in a report we published.)
But, I’m only using two: one we’ve built internally (and know its limits), and Brand Radar by Ahrefs.
It’s the only external tool I trust for AI search tracking.
You can track your brand’s visibility across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and AI Overviews, and compare it against competitors with clean, useful data visualizations.
Plus, you can track citations, your AI share of voice, and much more.
If AI search matters to you (it should), go check it out:
Most people think content has an AI problem.
They read studies like this one from Ahrefs, which found that 74.2% of new web pages contain AI-generated content, and they conclude:
There is too much content, and most of it is bad. (Even more so with AI.)
They are half right!
There is too much content, yes. But the quality of that content is not the real issue.
The real problem is that human consumption capacity has a ceiling, and we passed it years ago.
AI just made it impossible to ignore.
The math that breaks content marketing
Let’s try to frame this.
Content creation grew steadily, roughly linearly, for most of the 2010s.
Companies invested in blogs and content programs, and agencies scaled article production to meet demand.
Growth was real but manageable.
Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022…
Within a year, generative AI adoption jumped across organizations.
According to some studies, in 2024, the number of AI-generated articles surpassed that of human-written ones.
Author’s Note: That’s very difficult to validate, and the study I’m referring to isn’t the most reliable, which is why I won’t link to it here.
And with that, the consumption curve changed.
Content supply went exponential.
While human attention didn’t.
It is declining.
Mark Schaefer saw this coming in 2014.
He called it Content Shock: the point where content supply exceeds the audience’s ability to consume it.
His argument was simple.
There are only 24 hours in a day.
Even with growing internet usage and multiplying media formats, there is a hard ceiling on human attention.
He was right!
And twelve years later, AI has turned Content Shock from a theoretical concern into an observable crisis.
The second consumer of the internet
Here is where it gets interesting.
In June 2026, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted on X that, for the first time, bot traffic surpassed human traffic.
Here’s what the data looks like as of writing:
The crossover came a bit early. (Based on Prince’s own predictions.)
And let’s not forget the evolution of bots and search engine crawlers:
Agents
In plain English, an agent is a piece of software that reads and synthesizes content on behalf of users, then acts on what it finds.
According to a 2025 report by HUMAN Security, traffic from AI agents and agentic browsers grew 7,851% year over year.
That growth rate means agents went from a rounding error to a real consumer of web content in ~3 years.
This changes the consumption equation.
There are now two consumers of online content: humans and agents.
Humans browse, scan, read (sometimes), and make decisions.
Agents crawl, parse, summarize and recommend.
The question most content teams have not asked: which consumer are we creating for?
The consumption gap
No hard data behind this, but here’s how I think of the consumption gap:
The red/pink line is content creation.
Linear and (somewhat) manageable until late 2022, then exponential.
The blue line is human consumption capacity: growing slowly through the 2010s, then flattening and now declining.
The green dashed line is agent consumption: near zero until 2023, then climbing steeply.
The shaded area between the red line and everything below it is what I am calling the consumption gap.
Content that gets published and never gets consumed by anyone or anything.
That gap was narrow in 2014, when Schaefer wrote about Content Shock.
Today it is enormous, and it is growing every month.
The uncomfortable question
Let’s go philosophical for a minute.
If most new web pages contain AI-generated content, and human attention is declining, and bots now account for ~59% of web traffic, then a very large percentage of content being published right now will never be read by a human.
Not because it is bad. (Even though most content is indeed very bad.)
But because there are not enough human hours in the day to consume it.
So why is it being created?
I see four answers (plus a bonus one):
To justify the existence of in-house content teams. Content teams need to produce content to show they are doing their jobs. Output becomes a proxy for value. This is the worst reason to publish, and it is more common than anyone admits.
To justify agency retainers. Agencies bill for output. More articles = more deliverables. The incentive structure rewards volume regardless of whether anyone reads the work.
To feed AI agents, not humans. This reason is new, and it is legitimate. If your content is designed to be parsed by AI engines and recommended through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, or Claude, then you are optimizing for agents, not human readers.
To serve a specific audience with high-value content. The only answer that works for human consumption. Content designed for a defined audience at a specific stage of awareness, with a clear point of view and genuine utility. And a CLEAR distribution plan!
And now the bonus one:
It worked, and to a certain extent, it still does.
Marketers got away with mediocre content for years.
Rest assured, many of them still do, since major distribution channels such as Google and AI search continue to reward mediocre content.
The same doesn’t apply for social media, where the bar is (in most cases) higher, and the feedback loops are shorter.
In any event, there are answers.
Obviously, some of them may make some of us feel uncomfortable.
Still, they’re true, and regardless of what your answer is, you need to make a decision.
Two strategies, one decision
Companies need to make a choice:
Are they creating content for humans, for agents, or for both?
If you are writing for humans, then volume might be your enemy, unless you can maintain super high quality at scale.
But generally speaking, fewer pieces could result in higher quality, a stronger point of view, and better distribution.
That attention ceiling means you are competing for a shrinking share of a fixed resource.
If the audience is agents, the playbook is different.
Agents do not care about prose quality and whether you have strong opinions.
They care about information density, crawlability, and whether you can help them form an answer without having to consume the whole piece.
Most companies obviously need both.
Which means that we need more balanced content programs…
What a human reader values, narrative and a strong point of view, is invisible to an agent.
What an agent values, structure and machine-readability, puts a human to sleep.
Keep that in mind next time you’re having an internal discussion about content strategy.
Final Thoughts
Mark Schaefer warned us in 2014.
Not sure if he could predict ChatGPT and the paradigm shift that AI brought first and foremost into the world of bits.
Regardless, there’s so much content being created on a single day that can be consumed by humans and agents alike.
Obviously, different reasons.
Agents have computational limitations, and humans have finite time and attention spans.
So…
Content does not have an AI problem. Content has a consumption capacity problem.
The question for content teams and marketers is simple: is anyone actually consuming what you are creating? And if the answer is “mostly agents,” the follow-up: are you designing for that?
Thank you for reading today’s note, and see you again next week.
Research Disclaimers and Limitations
GrowthWaves and its author are not sponsored by or compensated by any company mentioned in this note. This is independent editorial analysis and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. The author may have relationships with, work with, or hold equity in companies referenced; however, no content in this piece was influenced, commissioned, or incentivized by any such relationship. AI tools were used as a research assistant in the preparation of this piece. All claims are sourced and linked throughout.
Sources
Cloudflare Radar, “Bot vs. Human Traffic” — real-time bot vs. human traffic split
HUMAN Security, “2026 State of AI Traffic & Cyberthreat Benchmarks” — agentic AI traffic grew 7,851% YoY; bots account for 57.4% of web requests
Mark Schaefer, “Content Shock” — the original 2014 essay coining the term