A third of webpages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds
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…
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.
And apparently, much of it is bots reading web pages written by other bots. Pew then used Open Pangram’s technology to detect how many were likely written or heavily edited by AI.
What Happened
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. To get a better sense of how much of the.
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.
In a random sample of 10,000 web pages collected in July 2026, around 10% showed “significant signs of AI authorship,” Pew said.
In this same snapshot with the older pages removed, signs of AI authorship were found in over one-third (35%) of the pages.
Key Details
Of course, this analysis is not perfect. Pangram, like other AI-detection tools, can misclassify pages as AI written when they weren’t.
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.
In addition,.org domains had only a 4.6% rate of AI authorship.
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Why It Matters
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.
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What Reports Say
Coverage of the story so far points to:
Continued reporting by TechCrunch as more details emerge
