A new study has revealed that over one-third of web pages published since the launch of ChatGPT are likely written or significantly edited by artificial intelligence. The research, conducted by Pew Research and based on data from the Common Crawl web archive, found that in a random sample of 10,000 web pages from July 2026, around 10% showed significant signs of AI authorship.

However, to get a clearer picture of how much of the internet is now being written by AI tools, Pew filtered out older web pages and focused only on those published after ChatGPT’s release. In this more recent snapshot, over one-third (35%) of the pages showed signs of AI authorship.

The analysis also revealed that websites with a .com domain were 10 times more likely to have been written by AI compared to .edu or .gov domains, which had rates around 1% and 4.6%, respectively. Drilling down further, certain phrasing such as ‘it’s not X, it’s Y’ was also found to be more common in AI-authored content.

While the data is likely at least directionally correct when scaled up, there are still potential misclassifications from AI detection tools like Open Pangram. Nonetheless, this study raises intriguing questions about how much of our digital world is being shaped by machines and what that might mean for human creativity in the future.