A third of web pages published since ChatGPT’s launch show signs of AI authorship, study finds
techcrunch ·
A Pew Research study released in August 2026 found that more than one-third (35%) of web pages published after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch show significant signs of AI authorship. The report analyzed nearly half a million English-language pages from the Common Crawl archive, using Open Pangram's detection technology. In a broader random sample of 10,000 pages collected in July 2026, about 10% showed such signs, but Pew filtered out older pages to isolate those published after ChatGPT. The study also found that .com domains showed signs of AI authorship at about 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov domains. Pew noted that AI-detection tools can misclassify pages, but the data is likely directionally correct at scale. Additionally, the report observed increases in stylistic markers associated with AI writing, such as em dashes, Oxford commas, and certain phrasing patterns. The study comes shortly after Cloudflare reported that bot web traffic had overtaken human web traffic.
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