Study Finds Over One-Third of New Web Pages Written or Edited by AI
According to a report released by Pew Research on Thursday, more than one-third of web pages published since the launch of ChatGPT exhibit indications of having been authored or significantly edited by artificial intelligence. This study aligns with findings from other investigations concerning the prevalence of AI-generated content in newer online material.
This revelation coincides with a separate report from Cloudflare, an internet infrastructure provider, which indicated that bot-generated web traffic has surpassed human traffic, reaching this milestone sooner than previously estimated.
Research Methodology
Pew Research utilized the Common Crawl web archive for its analysis, gathering nearly half a million English-language web pages published over the last five years, beginning approximately two years prior to ChatGPT’s release in November 2022. The firm employed Open Pangram’s technology to identify the extent of AI authorship or substantial editing in these pages.
In a random sample of 10,000 web pages collected in July 2026, Pew found that around 10% demonstrated notable signs of AI authorship. However, Pew noted that this sample inevitably included older web pages created before the advent of AI writing tools, which skewed the findings.
Findings on AI Authorship
After excluding older content, Pew’s focused analysis revealed that 35% of the web pages released post-ChatGPT displayed signs of AI authorship. The research further indicated that pages with a .com domain were about ten times more likely to be AI-authored compared to .edu or .gov domains, which showed a mere 1% and .org domains had a 4.6% rate of AI authorship.
Limitations and Observations
Pew acknowledged that the detection methods are not foolproof; tools like Open Pangram may misclassify non-AI-authored pages as AI-written. Nonetheless, the overall data is expected to provide a reliable directional insight into current trends.
Additionally, Pew noted an increase over the years in other stylistic indicators associated with AI authorship, such as the use of em dashes and Oxford commas, as well as specific phrase structures.
