One-third of webpages written by AI
More than one-third of webpages published the last four years were written or edited by artificial intelligence, according to a study of websites published since Open AI in November 2022 released AI-tool ChatGPT.
The study comprises 10 000 English-language pages. Of all the pages, 10% show signs of having been AI-written.
“The upward trend began in late 2022, when ChatGPT was first released, and continued as other AI chatbots such as Claude and Gemini followed. As time goes on, the share of webpages showing signs of AI authorship is increasing.”
“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 (.com, .org, .edu and .gov).”
“But in samples from 2026, around one-in-ten pages with a .com domain show signs of AI authorship”
This is about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%).
Signs of AI authorship are less common in .edu and .gov domains. the study says.
It also shows that looking at very large collections of texts together, we can see that certain types of punctuation, words and phrases show up at much higher rates in AI-generated content than in text written by humans.
“AI models are trained on large datasets of human writing, and they learn to mimic the patterns and styles of that writing. Sometimes certain types of writing are overrepresented in that training process. As a result, models trained on that data can end up using certain words, phrases or linguistic quirks more than humans typically do.”
For instance, lots of journalistic and academic writing uses the em dash (—), which is a punctuation mark used to indicate a break in thought or set off a parenthetical statement. AI models tend to use these dashes a lot more than humans typically do, according to the study.
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