A Third of the Post-ChatGPT Web Is AI-Written, Pew Finds

In brief

• Pew Research analyzed roughly 490,000 English-language webpages via the Common Crawl archive; 10% of a July 2026 snapshot show significant signs of AI authorship.
• Restricted to pages published after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch, that figure jumps to 35%.
• ".com" domains show AI-authorship signs at roughly 10 times the rate of ".edu" or ".gov" domains, and about double the rate of ".org."

AI-written content is everywhere, literally.

One in 10 English-language webpages now shows significant signs of being written by AI, according to a Pew Research Center study published Thursday. Narrow that sample to only pages published since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and the share jumps to 35%.

The findings come after researchers pulled roughly 490,000 pages from the Common Crawl web archive, spanning January 2021 through July 2026, then ran the text through Open Pangram, an AI detection model.

The AI fingerprint isn't spread evenly. Pages on .com domains show signs of AI authorship at roughly 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov domains, which sit near 1% each, and about double the 4.6% rate on .org sites.

In 2021, all four domain types looked nearly identical.

How Pew spotted the machines