One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research
A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI: Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship... If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even…
A Pew Research analysis of 500,000 English-language webpages over the past five years estimates that one-third of them now contain significant traces of AI authorship. This trend becomes even more pronounced when examining pages published after the release of ChatGPT. In a snapshot taken in July 2026, over one-third of these recent pages exhibited characteristics indicative of AI-generated content.
The distribution of AI-authored text isn't uniform across the web. Pages with a .com domain show the highest rate, at around one-in-ten, which is double the share on .org domains (4.6%) and ten times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%). This disparity in AI usage across different top-level domains suggests varying levels of adoption and application of AI tools by content creators.
Comparing the modern internet to a 2023 snapshot reveals notable changes in online text. Em dashes have become twice as common, while the use of Oxford commas has increased by 63%. Words frequently used by AI, such as "delve," "interplay," and "testament," have seen their usage more than double. Additionally, a stylistic feature known as negative parallelism, which involves expressing comparison in the form of "it's not just X, it's Y," has nearly tripled in frequency.
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