Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new Pew Research Center study. The finding arrives alongside a separate Pew survey showing the generation most immersed in AI tools has become its most reluctant endorser.
What Pew measured and how
In a random sample of 10,000 web pages collected in July 2026, around 10% showed significant signs of AI authorship. Pew pointed out that a random sample like this would inevitably include older web pages, ones published before AI writing tools even existed, and therefore could not have been AI-written. To get a better sense of how much of the web is now being written by AI, Pew filtered out the older web pages and focused only on those published after the release of ChatGPT, finding signs of AI authorship in over one-third (35%) of the pages.
The data comes from Common Crawl web archive snapshots collected between January 2021 and July 2026, analyzed using an open-weight AI detection model created by Pangram that looks for statistical differences in how human authors and AI models use language.
Pew acknowledges detectors can get individual documents wrong, but its argument is statistical: across hundreds of thousands of pages, the patterns separate reliably even when any single verdict might not. The report corroborates other studies that detail how much of the web’s newer pages are now either written by or substantially edited by AI.
Commercial web leads, academic and government domains lag
AI-authored text is not evenly spread across the web. When ChatGPT was first released, the kinds of linguistic patterns that can signal AI authorship appeared at similar rates across the main top-level web domains. But in samples from 2026, around one-in-ten pages with a .com domain show signs of AI authorship, about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%).
Pew is not claiming that one-third of every webpage was written entirely by AI. It looked for indicators suggesting that AI played a role in producing the content, whether generating a first draft, rewriting sections, or producing SEO-friendly copy.
The generational trust gap
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021. For the first time, a majority of adults under 30 (55%) now say they are more concerned than excited about AI.
About half of U.S. adults now report using AI chatbots, up substantially from 2024. A quarter (24%) use them daily.
A Fractl and Search Engine Land survey of 1,008 U.S. consumers in Q2 2026 found the share calling AI search more helpful than traditional search fell from 82% to 54% in a single year , suggesting that widespread AI use does not necessarily produce AI confidence.
A YouGov poll conducted on behalf of Pangram among 2,557 U.S. adults, with fieldwork undertaken April 9, 13, 2026, found 67% of people who consume online content say they have encountered AI-generated content that they believe provided false, misleading, or incorrect information. Among Gen Z adults ages 18, 28, that figure rose to 73%, the highest of any generation.
Why the numbers matter for everyday reading
Young adults who grew up online are now the heaviest AI tool users, yet the most alert to a web filling with machine-generated text. Research on U.S. teens being online almost constantly suggests that deep digital immersion sharpens scrutiny rather than dulling it.
Fractl found the share of consumers who say heavy AI use would decrease trust in a favorite brand nearly doubled, from 20% in 2025 to 39% in 2026, with Gen Z showing the highest likelihood of reduced trust at 54%.
The Pew web-content analysis was conducted by Samuel Bestvater, senior data scientist , and is available in full at the Pew Research Center Data Labs.
