Coined, 2026
Consensus Collapse
Consensus Collapse is why AI-written content earns almost nothing in AI search: it regresses to what the ranking pages already say.
"Without human intervention, an LLM cannot escape its training data. Originality is the one output it was never trained to produce."
Ask an AI for a comprehensive guide and the draft is fluent, on-topic and correct. It is also the average of everything already written, which is the consensus the top-ranking pages occupy. In vector space it lands on top of them, a near-duplicate of the results it was meant to beat.
Turning up the temperature does not fix it. The fix is new substance from a person: data, experience and concepts the model has never seen.