Show HN: How much of Hacker News is about AI?

hnstats.com

69 points by beekthos 18 hours ago


This website counts titles containing the standalone word "AI", case-sensitive and word-bounded. "OpenAI" doesn't count. "AI-powered" does. There's a toggle for a wider vocabulary: artificial intelligence spelled out, LLM, GPT, and model and vendor names.

Some quick stats:

- 14.4% of new HN titles this year, against 10.9% in 2025. On the wider vocabulary, 21.9% and 16.1%. - First month above 1% was Oct 2016. Above 5%, Feb 2023. Above 10%, May 2025. - Over the last five years the quietest month was Jan 2022 at 0.8%. The peak was Feb 2026 at 15.9%. - 13.6% on weekdays against 12.4% at weekends. - Show HN runs highest of any category at 19.8% this year, which makes this post part of the number.

As of this post, today is at 15% for the standard filter and 19% for the extended.

Dwedit - 17 hours ago

The topic of an article being AI and an "AI-Generated Article" are two completely different things.

caminanteblanco - 17 hours ago

Would there be some way to see what percentage of the front page meets those qualifications? I don't browse /new very often, so I have less of an idea of how representative that is. It would be interesting to see if they trend similarly.

Thanks for the cool project!

missingpackage - 18 hours ago

At first I thought about how many posts were written by AI

rzmmm - 17 hours ago

It's remarkable how stable 20-30% show HN concentration is after late 2022, for the extended stats.

waldrews - 15 hours ago

Every technical topic involves AI now. Even if it's about why the ancient Greeks didn't turn their steam engines to industrial use - the AI's should be researching the details. We might as well ask which topics involve humans or use language.

lanewinfield - 16 hours ago

I expected this to call out the number of links that are obviously vibe coded, like itself!

If you see:

- ALL CAPS subheaders

- a light beige background

- burnt sienna anchor and/or highlight text

- a "• LIVE" (or really any pulsing • symbol with an ALL CAPS follow-up)

- tons of variation in font sizes (this one has 15 different text sizes!)

- more typically, a lot of overexplaining

...you know it's vibe'd, specifically with Claude!

noxss - 16 hours ago

Interestingly, we can deduce that the actual percentage will always be higher since not everyone uses those labels/words.

sharemywin - 18 hours ago

it would be cool to use embeddings to categorize into like 10-20 categories and get a giant pie chart

kingkemol888 - 15 hours ago

This is a good project!

hartator - 17 hours ago

Would be curious to see how many comments are AI generated.

bklosky - 17 hours ago

you could fetch the text from linked blog posts over time and run 'em through pangram, I bet >20% of blogs linked on HN today are totally LLM written

geludobre - 13 hours ago

AI itself, is an increasing topic, overall, in our day-to-day personal and professional life. It's either embrace it now, or cry later.

ChrisArchitect - 17 hours ago

Related:

How Much of HN is AI? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435728

- 16 hours ago
[deleted]
lupire - 16 hours ago

Who would do this project and not use an LLM to classify what counts as "AI"?

Vaslo - 16 hours ago

I tried to click on the link at work and it got blocked as "pornography".

regexman1 - 18 hours ago

Brilliant

noobplus - 17 hours ago

And so comes the AI comments as many as the AI posts just saying for fun

xpct - 17 hours ago

Good. Now do what % of posts link to AI generated articles.

philipwhiuk - 16 hours ago

Recursive given that this is AI generated from another post on how much AI was on HN.

zhixingheyi2023 - 6 hours ago

[dead]

marshblocker - 16 hours ago

You don't need a website for this.