The Real Impact of AI Slop: What the Numbers Show, and What Comes Next

Scope. "Slop" — mass-produced, low-quality, machine-generated content that nobody asked for — has become a measurable, dominant feature of the information ecosystem. This bilingual research document systematises the published measurements across the layers of the phenomenon: overall traffic composition (bots surpassing human traffic), content production (74% of new English-language websites AI-written in the 900,000-site Ahrefs sample), search results (AI-written share of top-20 results), search behaviour (five independent zero-click measurements; click-through collapses of 30–61% under Google AI Overviews, measured by five research firms), platform-level saturation (YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook), and the market for reviews. Frame. The analysis reads the trust collapse of the review and content markets through Akerlof's market for lemons, connects the data layers to the model-collapse literature (AI systems increasingly trained on AI output), and closes with scenarios for the information ecosystem and the emerging premium on verified, attributable, human-anchored content. Method. cc-research pipeline v0.3.0 — four academic search backends (Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref, Elicit), a proprietary book corpus (1.48 million text passages, RAG), web research, and the author's prior 110+-source empirical research series on AI search and zero-click behaviour. Every figure is source-attributed in the text. Az AI Slop valós hatása — mit mutatnak a számok, és mi jön ezután? A rekord a teljes magyar kutatási dokumentumot és teljes angol fordítását tartalmazza; a 2026. március 8-án a LinkedIn-en publikált cikk alapjául szolgáló dokumentum. (This record contains the full Hungarian research document and its full English translation — the document underlying the article published on LinkedIn on 8 March 2026.)