GoKawiilOver 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.
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