Over one-third of webpages published since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 show significant signs of AI authorship, according to a new study from Pew Research released Thursday. The report, which analyzed nearly half a million English-language webpages from the Common Crawl archive, found that 35% of pages published after the AI chatbot’s launch were likely written or heavily edited by artificial intelligence.
The study arrives shortly after internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare reported that bot web traffic had overtaken human web traffic — a milestone reached sooner than the company had estimated. Pew’s data, however, focuses not on who or what is browsing the web, but on what is being browsed. And apparently, much of it is bots reading webpages written by other bots.
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Methodology and Key Findings
Pew researchers used the Common Crawl web archive to collect a random sample of webpages from the past five years, starting a couple of years before ChatGPT’s release. They then employed Open Pangram’s technology to detect how many pages showed signs of AI authorship. In a random sample of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, around 10% showed “significant signs of AI authorship,” Pew said. However, the firm noted that this random sample would inevitably include older webpages — ones published before AI writing tools even existed, and therefore couldn’t have been AI-written.
To get a better sense of how much of the web is now being written by AI, Pew filtered out the older webpages and focused only on those published after ChatGPT’s release. In this same snapshot with the older pages removed, signs of AI authorship were found in over one-third (35%) of the pages.
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Drilling down into domains themselves, Pew found that URLs with a .com domain showed signs of AI authorship at around 10 times the rate of a .edu or .gov domain (both of which were around 1% AI-authored). In addition, .org domains had only a 4.6% rate of AI authorship.
Limitations and Linguistic Tells
Pew acknowledged that the analysis is not perfect. Pangram, like other AI detection tools, can misclassify pages as AI-written when they weren’t. But at scale, the data is likely at least directionally correct. In addition, Pew found that other supposed tells of AI authorship had also increased over the years, like the use of em dashes, Oxford commas, and phrasing like “it’s not X, it’s Y,” among other things.
These linguistic markers, while not definitive on their own, contribute to a growing body of evidence that AI-generated content is becoming increasingly prevalent across the web. The findings raise important questions about the quality and reliability of online information, particularly as AI tools become more sophisticated and harder to detect.
Implications for the Web and Content Creators
The study’s findings have significant implications for publishers, marketers, and readers alike. For publishers, the prevalence of AI-generated content underscores the need for solid editorial standards and transparency about AI use. For readers, it highlights the importance of critical evaluation of online sources, as AI-generated content may lack the nuance and fact-checking of human-written journalism.
The rise of AI-authored content also poses challenges for search engines and content platforms, which must balance the need for fresh, relevant content with the risk of low-quality, spammy AI-generated pages. As AI detection tools improve and become more widely adopted, the web may see a shift toward greater accountability and transparency in content creation.
For now, the Pew study serves as a stark reminder of how quickly AI has transformed the digital environment. As the technology continues to evolve, the line between human and machine authorship will likely become even more blurred, making it increasingly important for consumers to stay informed and discerning.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The cryptocurrency and technology markets are volatile and uncertain; readers should conduct their own research before making any decisions.
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