A Third of the Post-ChatGPT Web Is AI-Written, Pew Finds
Pew Research Center found that AI-written or AI-assisted text is widespread on the web: about 10% of English-language webpages show significant signs of AI authorship, rising to 35% for pages published since ChatGPT launched in late 2022. The study analyzed roughly 490,000 pages from Common Crawl using an AI-detection model. AI fingerprints vary sharply by domain. .com pages show about 10 times the AI rate of .edu and .gov sites, which are near 1% each, and about double .org sites. In 2021, these domains looked similar, but .com pages climbed to 9.35% by January 2026. Pew also notes more common AI-style writing patterns since 2023, including em dashes, Oxford commas, and words like “delve” and “interplay.” The findings are imperfect because detection can misclassify pages, and many cases likely involve AI assistance rather than fully generated text.
