A third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds
ChatGPT and other AI models are now authoring and editing much of the new web.
A recent study from Pew Research indicates that a significant portion of web pages published since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 display characteristics consistent with AI authorship. According to the report, over one-third (35%) of these newer web pages are believed to have been either written by AI or substantially edited by the technology.
This finding aligns with other studies that highlight the growing prevalence of AI-generated content on the internet. The study, conducted by analyzing nearly half a million English-language web pages from the past five years, primarily sourced from the Common Crawl web archive, aimed to quantify the extent of AI-generated content.
Utilizing Open Pangram’s technology, Pew identified "significant signs of AI authorship" in approximately 10% of the web pages sampled in July 2026. However, recognizing that a random sample like this would include older web pages, the researchers filtered out pre-existing content from before ChatGPT's release to focus solely on pages published after November 2022.
The analysis revealed that .com domains showed the highest rate of AI authorship, around ten times that of .edu or .gov domains, which both had a minimal AI authorship rate around 1%. Additionally, .org domains showed a 4.6% rate of AI authorship. While the study acknowledges potential limitations, such as the possibility of AI-detection tools misclassifying pages as AI-written, the data provides a valuable insight into the increasing reliance on AI for content creation on the web.
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