New research reveals AI may now be responsible for writing one-third of every recently made webpage users come across.This is according to a new report done by the American Pew Research Center, which used an AI detection software to analyze almost half a million English-language webpages from the past five years.They took a random sample of 10,000 webpages from the larger sample, which gave them "a snapshot of what the English-language internet looked like at that point in time." Looking for signs of AI authorship, they found among websites that were created after the release of the first public large language model (LLM) chatbot — ChatGPT — in November 2022, one in three were almost certainly written by AI..They claim this statistic is in line with other studies, such as the one from earlier in 2026.The study found that as of mid-2025, 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted.As a result, the study found "evidence suggesting that increases in AI-generated text on the internet bring about a decrease in semantic diversity..."The Pew Research Center study observed most website domains (.com, .org, .edu, and .gov) had a similar amount of AI authorship after ChatGPT first came out..However, in 2026, the most AI authorship can be found on .com domains, around one in 10 .com pages was written by AI, with AI authorship remaining less common on .org and .gov sites. They also disclose that AI detection is not foolproof — sometimes they misdiagnose human-written work as AI, if the work typically includes certain punctuation, words, and phrases that are usual tells of AI-generated content.AI-generated writing generally includes high use of em dashes, Oxford commas, certain vocabulary, and negative parallelism (it's not just a, it's b).
