Pew found strong signs of AI authorship in around 10% of a random sample of webpages in July 2026, rising to more than a third among pages published since ChatGPT’s release. Commercial domains carry most of it, at about 10% of .com against roughly 1% of .edu and .gov.
About a tenth of the web now shows strong signs of having been written by a machine. Pew examined a random sample of 10,000 pages in July 2026 and found roughly 10% carrying AI authorship signals.
The headline figure everyone is quoting is the other one. Among pages published since ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, more than a third show those signals, which is a different claim about a much smaller slice of the internet.
The distinction matters because the web is old. Most of what exists was published before the models did, so a page-level average across everything understates what is happening to new writing.
The method is worth stating plainly. Pew classified nearly 500,000 English-language pages from the Common Crawl archive between January 2021 and July 2026 using Open Pangram, the detector Substack adopted to catch machine-written newsletters.
