A third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds

Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web’s newer web pages are now either written by or “substantially…

Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web’s newer web pages are now either written by or “substantially edited” by AI, the firm says. It also arrives shortly after internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare reported that bot web traffic had overtaken human web traffic — a milestone that was reached sooner than the company had estimated. Pew’s data, however, is focused not on who or what is browsing the web, but on what is being browsed. And apparently, much of it is bots reading web pages written by other bots. To compile the report, Pew said it used the Common Crawl web archive to collect nearly half a million English-language web pages from the past five or so years, starting a couple of years before ChatGPT’s November 2022 release. Pew then used Open Pangram’s technology to detect how many were likely written or heavily edited by AI. In a random sample of 10,000 web pages collected in July 2026, around 10% showed “significant signs of AI authorship,” Pew said. However, Pew pointed out that a random sample like this would inevitably include older web pages — ones published before AI writing tools even existed, and therefore couldn’t have been AI written. % of web pages showing significant AI editing or authorship.Image Credits:Pew Research To get a better sense of how much of the web is now being written by AI, Pew filtered out the older web pages and focused only on those published after the release of ChatGPT. In this same snapshot with the older pages removed, signs of AI authorship were found in over one-third (35%) of the pages. Image Credits:Pew Research Drilling down into domains themselves, Pew found that URLs with a .com domain showed signs of AI authorship at around 10x the rate of a .edu or .gov domain (both of which were around 1% AI authored). In addition, .org domains had only a 4.6% rate of AI authorship. Of course, this analysis is not perfect. Pangram, like other AI-detection tools, can misclassify pages as AI written when they weren’t. But at scale, the data is likely at least directionally correct. In addition, Pew found that other supposed tells of AI authorship had also increased over the years, like the use of em dashes, Oxford commas, and phrasing like “it’s not X, it’s Y,” among other things. Topics AI, ChatGPT, pew research When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Sarah Perez Consumer News Editor Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. You can contact or verify outreach from Sarah by emailing sarahp@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at sarahperez.01 on Signal. View Bio October 13 – 15 San Francisco In less than 48 hours, your chance to save up to $300 on your tickets will end! REGISTER NOW Most Popular Home batteries are suddenly cheap and everywhere. Here’s why. Tim De Chant Cursor capitalizes on GitHub frustration, launches rival hosting platform Lucas Ropek Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month Julie Bort AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google’s Chrome team Lucas Ropek Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+ Anthony Ha Anthropic shares more details about how Claude’s new watermarks will work Anthony Ha 7 desk gadgets that can make your workday better Aisha Malik

Source: TechCrunch — Published August 20, 2026 at 17:18 UTC — Category: Business