More Than a Third of New Web Pages Since ChatGPT Launched Look AI-Written
August 21, 2026
Based on reporting by TechCrunch → — simplified & explained by VAIIYA.
What the study looked at
Researchers at Pew Research wanted to answer a simple-sounding question: how much of the internet is now written by AI instead of humans? To find out, they pulled almost half a million English-language web pages from a huge public archive of the internet called Common Crawl, covering roughly the last five years, and ran them through a detection tool built to spot AI-generated or AI-heavily-edited writing.
What they found
When Pew looked at a broad sample of recent pages, only about 1 in 10 showed strong signs of AI authorship — but that number includes plenty of older pages written before AI writing tools even existed. Once they narrowed the sample to only pages published after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, the number jumped dramatically: about 35%, or roughly one in three pages, showed real signs of being AI-written or AI-edited.
Where it shows up most
Not all corners of the internet are equal here. Regular commercial websites (the ones ending in ".com") had AI-authorship rates around ten times higher than education (".edu") or government (".gov") sites, which stayed near just 1%. Nonprofit sites (".org") landed in between, at under 5%. That pattern makes some intuitive sense — commercial content is often produced quickly and at scale to attract search traffic, while university and government sites tend to be written more formally and reviewed by more people before publishing.
How they actually spotted "AI writing"
Beyond the detection software itself, the researchers noticed some telltale stylistic habits that show up more often in AI-generated text — things like heavier use of em dashes, more frequent Oxford commas, and repeated sentence patterns like "it's not X, it's Y."
Why this matters
This lands alongside other recent findings — including data from Cloudflare suggesting that automated bot traffic has now overtaken human traffic on the web overall. Together, these studies paint a picture of an internet where an increasing share of both the content and the visitors are no longer human at all.