Essay Mill Industry Web Traffic Update
Jan 2023 - Feb 2025: Essay Mills, AI Writing Sites, Humanizers, and more
The EMDB (Essay Mill Database) is a massive spreadsheet with 438 Essay Mills, Humanizers, and AI Writing Sites along with meta data about each of the sites: location, traffic, URLs, policies, and a bunch more.
As of today, there are >13,000 datapoints, up to date through February ‘25.
Subscribers of This Isn’t Fine get access and do the important work of helping to fund the time, effort, and tools required to keep the EMDB up to date and produce reports like the one you’ll find below. Subscriptions go a long way in squeezing a little lemon in the eye of Essay Mills and start at just $50/yr.
State of the Essay Mills
TL;DR
Traffic declines continue for traditional Essay Mills (but they just. won’t. die.).
Traffic is up BIG for AI writing tech (inclusive of humanizers)
The big 4 of “Homework Help” site traffic declines are correlated with that of the Essay Mills.
New category of Technical Interview Defeat tools are rising fast.
Essay Mills
The decline in Essay Mill traffic is real, but the rate of change is trending to a new normal as the industry pivots as a response to AI writing solutions and AI homework helping sites.
December ‘24 Essay Mill traffic was off -12.97% compared to December ‘23 (Jan ‘25 was down -16.98%; Jan ‘24 vs Jan ‘23 was nearly -50%).
While AI continues to shake the industry like a puppy with a plush toy, some sites continue to show growth (and we continue to see posturing of “human” value, longer writing [dissertations/thesis], and sustained advertising via Google, Meta, & elsewhere).
AI Writing Tech
Moving into grayer areas, we’ve cast as specific a net as we can to highlight tools that are explicitly focused on writing generically enough that use cases include writing essays and academic papers.
These sites are up 191.25% year over year (82 sites).
We do not include
ChatGPT, Claude, or even Google Docs which get billions of views per month
Jasper.AI, Ahrefs, NovelAI, or others that have differentiated to serve non-student audiences (this was a little more art than science by reviewing the sites, their product features, and positioning).
Rising text editors that include some AI features (like Hemingway and Lex)
The list does include
AI Essay writing sites
Humanizers and spinners
AI tech that labels itself as “homework help”
Browser extension tools that apply AI in quizzes (as a product feature)
Technical Interview Copilots
This segment, all told, is about 7x the traffic to Essay Mills and on an upward trajectory.
A few notes:
this category has grown in number of sites we track and overall traffic since October ‘23.
a site added and tracked does not include complete historical data (we can only go back about 3 months).
The above chart metrics are in flux and will continue to grow as more of these sites come to our attention1.
Humanizers
As a subset, these text spinners and paraphrasers are created for the express purpose of making AI generated text undetectable through AI detectors like Copyleaks, Pangram, Originality AI, or Turnitin (in fact, most score themselves against a growing list of detectors as part of their marketing).
These sites are up 518.05% year over year as a category (16 sites).
Big 4 Homework Help
The mantel of “homework help” has been shifted recently to AI-powered apps. There are quite a few that shoulder that terminology already while pushing social proof (University logos).
The big four are Chegg, Quizlet, Coursehero, and Quillbot.
Year over year they are down -39.71%.
The demise of Chegg has been well-documented. It’s fallen from high flier blue chip to penny stock in a rapid and public way (as public companies do).
Theses sites are facing the similar macro headwinds impacting Essay Mills. Comparatively, their traffic volume continues to fall:
Note, EM traffic is left axis, “Homework help” right. ‘
Technical Interview Co-pilots
An area to watch is a new breed of proctoring defeat tools. So far they are focused on “leet code” interviews which might just leverage Zoom, but the technology could hop over to attack web-based proctoring (watch here for testing outcomes).
We became aware of these in the last month through Reddit and other channels but the viral case of a Columbia University student who created interviewcoder.co has definitely put this in the zeitgeist.
In just three months these sites are up 208.66% (6 total sites tracked)
Conclusion and a few thoughts
Demand for traditional essay mills has fallen/is falling: The desire for cognitive outsourcing to another human is down but way, way up for doing it with computers. I suspect, there are a lot of reasons for this (lower barrier, lower cost, less fear of extortion, backlash against or non-use of AI detectors, lower stigma, noisier signals…)
Markets are dynamic: We estimated the global English-language market to be $4bn in late 2022.
If we assume that traffic is correlated with revenue, Essay Mills are off at least 50% since ChatGPT: $2bn market.
Applying the same estimate to AI site (7x the traffic of our EM collection) that would be $14bn (too high IMO).
However, AI output per page costs about 90% less than an Essay Mill; which would peg AI-enabled cheating sites at about $1.4bn.
To put that in context, the plagiarism detection market is estimated at less than $2bn in 2024. 2 😬
The types of tools available for cheating has changed since ChatGPT launched in 2022. The popularity (measured through traffic) has also shifted significantly from human to computer (cognitive outsourcing to AI). Essay Mills deserve no pity for their demise.
Based on all the above, I still think that Authorship and transparency in writing has to be part of our collective path forward for any system of trust and will continue working on that. Wish me luck…
Keep on doing your good work.
We do add new Essay Mills as we find them, but still believe that directionally their traffic and popularity are declining.