The death of the human web? Report finds over a third of web pages pushed live since the launch of ChatGPT show evidence of being written by AI | Daily Reports Online
- AI authorship is increasingly employed for web pages, Pew Research Center report claims
- Over 33% of pages published since the launch of ChatGPT reportedly show signs of AI generation
- Of the 10,000-page sample used in the study, 10% of pages had signs of AI authorship
An incredible 35% of web pages published since the launch of ChatGPT show signs of AI authorship, new research has claimed.
A study from the Pew Research Center, which used automated tools to assess a sample of 10,000 web pages, also found that in the entire sample – based on data from the Common Crawl project – almost 10% of all pages had signs of AI creation.
The “How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?” report also found that certain types of websites are more likely to feature some AI generation, while detecting some of the key fingerprints of AI-generated text, which goes beyond em dashes.
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AI is writing more and more web pages
The report – which was compiled using a machine learning model tasked with looking for signs of AI authorship – found that 9.6% of all pages in the sample of 10,000 appeared to have been written by AI. While that may seem a small amount, the sample from Common Crawl dates back to the beginning of the World Wide Web, over 30 years ago.
In keeping with other research (such as AI on the Internet), the data indicates that “large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI.”
Reassuringly, the data highlights the interesting point that the majority of the suspected AI-generated web pages published in 2026 are .com domains and, as such typically commercial. In contrast, just 1% are .edu (US-based educational facilities) and 0.8% are .gov.
Is it written by AI?
Using its evaluation of 490,000 English-language web pages, the Pew Research Center also established some more useful indicators (“common features”) of AI text generation.
The em dash is regularly held up as an example of AI writing, as is the use of the Oxford comma. The em dash appears “twice as frequently” in pages published since 2023, while Oxford commas have a 63% increase. The report authors note that these aren’t solitary indicators (“Humans use these in their writing too!”)
Other “tells” offer a more reliable giveaway of AI-generated writing, as demonstrated by the report. Certain words and trends are listed by the research, including “delve,” “interplay,” and “testament,” which have apparently “more than doubled in usage.” The report lists numerous examples of “AI-typical vocabulary.”
Meanwhile, the negative parallelism, which you might have seen as “it’s not just X, it’s Y,” has almost trebled in use.
It might be increasingly difficult to identify an AI-generated web page these days, but if it comes from a .edu or .gov domain, it is overall more likely to have been written by a human.
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