Pew: 35% of new web pages show AI authorship since ChatGPT

Pew Research released a new study Thursday revealing that over one-third (35%) of web pages published since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 show significant signs of AI authorship. The firm used the Common Crawl archive to collect roughly half a million English-language web pages, spanning from about two years before ChatGPT's release through July 2026. It then deployed Open Pangram's AI-detection technology to identify pages likely written or heavily edited by AI.

In a random sample of 10,000 pages from July 2026, about 10% showed strong AI signals — but Pew filtered out older pages to isolate the post-ChatGPT era, which yielded the 35% figure. The study also found that .com domains showed AI authorship at roughly 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov domains (around 1% each), while .org domains sat at 4.6%. Pew acknowledged detection tools can misclassify content, but the data is directionally reliable at scale. The report arrives after Cloudflare noted bot traffic had overtaken human traffic, and it notes stylistic tells like em dashes, Oxford commas, and phrases such as "it's not X, it's Y" have increased across the web.