Pew Finds 10% of Webpages Show AI Authorship Signs by July 2026
Updated
Updated · CNET · Aug 21
Pew Finds 10% of Webpages Show AI Authorship Signs by July 2026
3 articles · Updated · CNET · Aug 21
Summary
Nearly 1 in 10 English webpages sampled in July 2026 showed significant signs of AI authorship in a new Pew Research study.
Pew scanned almost 500,000 pages from Common Crawl and used Open Pangram to detect likely AI-written or AI-edited text, while noting such tools can misclassify both human and machine writing.
Pages published after ChatGPT’s November 2022 release showed a much sharper rise in AI-like text, with an earlier Pew summary putting that share at 35% for post-ChatGPT webpages.
.com sites carried the most AI-derived text at about 10%, versus 4.6% on .org pages and roughly 1% on .edu and .gov domains.
Em dashes appeared twice as often in AI-like text and Oxford commas 63% more often, underscoring how generative tools are reshaping the web’s writing patterns.