One-Third of Webpages Show AI Authorship Since ChatGPT Launch, Pew Research Study Reveals

A third of webpages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds

Over one-third of webpages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web's newer webpages are now either written by or "substantially edited" by AI, the firm says. It also arrives shortly after internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare reported that bot web traffic had overtaken human web traffic -- a milestone that was reached sooner than the company had estimated. Pew's data, however, is focused 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. To compile the report, Pew said it used the Common Crawl web archive to collect nearly half a million English-language webpages from the past five or so years, starting a couple of years before ChatGPT's November 2022 release. Pew then used Open Pangram's technology to detect how many were likely written or heavily edited by AI. In a random sample of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, around 10% showed "significant signs of AI authorship," Pew said. However, Pew pointed out that a random sample like this 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 the release of ChatGPT. In this same snapshot with the older pages removed, signs of AI authorship were found in over one-third (35%) of the pages. 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. Of course, this 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.

One-third of the web is showing signs of AI authorship, thanks to ChatGPT

Pew Research Center finds signs of AI authorship across a significant share of web pages published since late 2022. The internet has been filling up with AI-generated content ever since ChatGPT arrived, but a new analysis from Pew Research Center puts just how widespread it has become into perspective. According to the study, roughly one-third of web pages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship. The internet didn't become AI overnight The important word here is "signs." Pew's research isn't saying that one-third of every webpage on the internet was written entirely by an AI. Instead, it looked for indicators suggesting that AI played a role in producing the content. That's an important distinction because modern online writing isn't simply divided into human and machine. A writer might use AI to generate a first draft, rewrite sections, clean up grammar, expand an article, or produce an SEO-friendly version. The final page can therefore contain both human and machine contributions. Recommended Videos The trend is nevertheless hard to ignore. ChatGPT launched publicly in November 2022, and the share of web content showing signs of AI authorship has climbed substantially since then. The findings add to earlier research suggesting that AI-generated or AI-assisted content has become a significant part of the web rather than a weird corner populated by obvious content farms. And this creates a rather strange internet There's an interesting irony here. AI companies need enormous amounts of human-created material to train their models, while those same models are now helping produce more of the content that eventually gets published online. The internet is increasingly becoming a place where humans write for machines, machines write for humans, and machines may eventually train on what other machines wrote. There is also a big difference between how much AI content exists and how much people actually see. Earlier research from Graphite found AI-generated articles approaching half of newly published online articles, while its separate analysis found that human-written articles still dominate Google search results and AI citations. That means the web isn't necessarily about to become an endless wall of AI slop. But Pew's findings show that the old assumption that something published online was probably written by a person is becoming increasingly unreliable. The internet is still human, but AI is no longer just visiting. It's starting to move in.