More than one-third of English-language webpages published since ChatGPT launched show significant signs of being written or substantially edited by artificial intelligence, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. Pew examined around 490,000 English-language webpages collected through Common Crawl between January 2021 and July 2026. The pages were analyzed using the Open Pangram AI-detection model.

Pew examined around 490,000 English-language webpages collected through Common Crawl between January 2021 and July 2026. The pages were analyzed using the Open Pangram AI-detection model.

Across the entire July 2026 sample, including older pages that predate modern generative AI, 10% showed significant signs of AI authorship.

When Pew considered only webpages published after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch, however, AI signals appeared in more than one-third of pages in its July 2026 snapshot.

AI-generated or AI-edited text is not spread evenly across the internet.

In Pew’s 2026 samples, roughly one in 10 .com webpages showed signs of AI authorship.

That was around twice the 4.6% rate on .org sites and roughly 10 times higher than the approximately 1% recorded on both .edu and .gov domains.

Pew also found that several writing habits commonly associated with AI models have become much more frequent online since 2023.

The use of em dashes has roughly doubled, while Oxford commas have increased by 63%.

Words frequently associated with AI-generated writing, including “delve,” “interplay,” and “testament,” have more than doubled in frequency.

Another pattern known as negative parallelism, such as “it’s not just X, it’s Y,” has nearly tripled, although Pew noted that the construction remains relatively uncommon overall.

Pew cautioned that these writing habits alone cannot determine whether an individual article was written by AI. Humans also use them, and AI-detection tools can incorrectly classify both human and machine-written text.

However, Pew said analyzing hundreds of thousands of documents together can reveal broader changes in how online writing is evolving as generative AI becomes more widely used.

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