One in Three New Web Pages Is Now Written by AI, Study Finds

Pew Research says 35% of web pages published since ChatGPT launched show signs of AI writing. Here's what that means.

The internet is filling up with content written by machines — and the pace is picking up fast.

A new study from the Pew Research Center (a respected non-profit that studies trends in society and technology) looked at roughly 490,000 English-language web pages. The finding? About 1 in 10 web pages now shows strong signs of being written by AI.

But here's the striking part: if you only look at pages created after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, that number jumps to 35% — more than a third.

Key numbers from the study:

10% of all English web pages show signs of AI authorship
35% of pages published after ChatGPT's launch show those signs
.com sites (commercial websites, like shops and blogs) have AI content at about 10 times the rate of .edu (schools) or .gov (government) sites
.com AI-writing rates rose from about 1% in 2021 to 9.35% by January 2026

How did they spot the AI? Researchers used a detection tool called Open Pangram, which looks at writing patterns rather than single words. Some tell-tale signs have become far more common since 2023:

Em dashes (the long dash — like this) appear roughly twice as often
Oxford commas up 63%
AI-favorite words like "delve," "interplay," and "testament" more than doubled

Why do commercial sites lead the pack? Government and university sites go through slow editing and official review. Meanwhile, .com sites include "content farms" — websites that pump out huge amounts of pages to attract clicks and advertising money, far faster than any human writer could manage.

Pew is careful to add a warning: detection tools aren't perfect, and "signs of AI" doesn't always mean a page was fully machine-written. Many pages are simply AI-assisted (a human using AI as a helper).

The bottom line: AI-written content is now a normal part of the web, and the trend is climbing steeply. Companies like Anthropic are even working on hidden "watermarks" to make AI text easier to identify in the future.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://decrypt.co/376271/chatgpt-web-ai-written-pew