Pew Research analyzed nearly half a million English-language web pages from the past five years using Common Crawl and Open Pangram's detection technology. In a random sample of 10,000 pages from July 2026, about 10% showed significant AI authorship signs.
However, after filtering out older pages published before ChatGPT's November 2022 release, the rate jumped to over one-third (35%) of the remaining pages showing AI authorship indicators. The study also found .com domains had AI authorship rates around 10 times higher than .edu or .gov domains, which both hovered around 1%, while .org domains showed a 4.6% rate.
Pew noted other AI-associated writing markers also increased, such as em dashes, Oxford commas, and phrases like "it's not X, it's Y." The researchers acknowledged AI detection tools can misclassify pages, though they believe the directional trend is accurate at scale.