Pew Research Center released a new study on August 20, stating that more than one-third of the websites launched after ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 show signs of AI-written or heavily edited content, indicating that generative AI is rapidly changing the internet content ecosystem.
The study is based on the Common Crawl web archive, covering about 500,000 English websites over the past five years and using Open Pangram technology to detect AI-generated content. In a random sample of 10,000 websites from July 2026, approximately 10% showed clear signs of AI-generated content. Because the sample included many older websites published before AI became prevalent, Pew further removed early pages and found that about 35% of websites created after the release of ChatGPT showed signs of AI-generated content.
Looking at domain names, the proportion of .com websites showing signs of AI-generated content is about 10 times higher than that of .edu and .gov websites, which have a rate of around 1%. The .org websites have a rate of about 4.6%. Pew noted that AI detection tools may have false positives, so the data is not absolutely accurate, but the overall trend is still valuable for reference.
