Pew Study: 35% of Web Pages Since ChatGPT Show AI Signs

More than one-third of web pages published online since the public debut of ChatGPT in November 2022 show significant signs of being written or substantially edited by artificial intelligence, according to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center. The study, released on August 21, 2026, provides one of the most concrete measurements to date of how rapidly generative AI tools have reshaped digital content creation.

To conduct the research, Pew scientists analyzed nearly 500,000 English-language web pages collected from the Common Crawl archive, spanning roughly from early 2021 through July 2026. They used an AI-detection tool called Open Pangram to assess the text. In a random sample of 10,000 pages from July 2026, approximately 10 percent displayed strong indicators of AI authorship. However, this overall figure includes vast amounts of older content created before AI writing tools existed. When researchers filtered the data to focus only on pages published after ChatGPT's release, the proportion jumped dramatically to 35 percent.

The distribution of this AI-influenced content is highly uneven across different types of websites. Commercial .com domains showed signs of AI...