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One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research (pewresearch.org) 93

Posted by EditorDavid from the world-wide-slop dept.
A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI:

Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship... If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even more pronounced. In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released. This is in line with other studies that have shown that large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI.

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 — about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%).
They even identified specific ways online text has changed, "comparing the internet of today to a snapshot from 2023."
  • Em dashes appear twice as often
  • Oxford commas increased 63%.
  • Words used more frequently by AI (like "delve," "interplay" or "testament") have more than doubled in usage.
  • "Negative parallelism" comparisons ("it's not just X, it's Y") have nearly tripled.

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One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research More

One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research

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  • no surprise (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    heavy correlation with places where the work is all fake anyway

    yes i'm looking at you, business management.

    • Re: no surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @01:02AM (#66303974) Homepage Journal

      And the last 15 years the corporate web pages have been dumbed down to irrelevancy so you can't find any useful info anymore.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        You think these web pages are created just to tick a box and not to actually be used by people? Probably. In that case it does not matter that they are slop.

      • Re: no surprise (Score:5, Interesting)

        by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @06:30AM (#66304216)

        And the last 15 years the corporate web pages have been dumbed down to irrelevancy so you can't find any useful info anymore.

        And to think my mod points expired yesterday. This is my number one issue with web pages. Lack of information. If you're going to advertise a product or service, how about explaining what it does. Don't wave your hand and market speak everything. Flat out state, "This will allow you to create graphics beyond your imagination." (possibly a bit hyperbolic, but at least you know it's a graphics program)

        The same goes for local businesses and what hours they're open. Don't make people scroll to the bottom of a page or have to go through several drop-down menus to find out when you're open. Put it near the top, next to your phone number.

        • I wonder if devaluing UI and graphic design as disciplines has anything to do with it.

          I certainly see a lot of that "anyone can do it" attitude here on Slashdot. But if anyone could do it, where do all the shitty websites come from?

      • To find the useful stuff among the AI corporate mush. AI are very good at sorting wheat from chaff.

    • It's not that it's fake. It's that most work is predictable.

      • Not all webpages need to be creative but I definitely expect them to be informative. So what if someone uses AI to edit or help generate the information. So long as the information is factual, it's irrelevant how it was generated. Obviously after generation, you'll want to thoroughly go over your new website to ensure it's accurate, etc.

        AI is just another tool and it's not going anywhere. In fact, it's getting easier and easier to run more powerful models locally. Someone on here said this a couple weeks ag

  • I think it's missing some nuance (Score:5, Funny)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @12:59AM (#66303968) Journal
    It's always easy to glibly jump to conclusions in any area. But if we delve into these assertions, it's not just artificial intelligence, it's the interface's comfort and familiarity — as we see it match, soothe, and calm our cognition even as it begins the slippery slope to supplant it [psychologytoday.com].

    It's not the interplay between the decrease in literacy [futurism.com] in high school and college and artificial intelligence's improvement in text generation, it's a testament to the complexity of the problem — being critical to delve into the cognitive, cultural, and other foundations of human language and thought — in addition to examining not just the production, but also the consumption of language by both the human brain and large language models.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      —

      I see what you did there.

    • The emdashes and possibly writing style in your post could imply use of ai. I wonder if ai detection tools can differentiate copy that has been corrected/massaged by ai from copy that was completely generated by ai. I don't have ai write for me, but I do sometimes ask it to identify typos, grammatical errors, inconsistencies, illogical sequences, and things like that, and sometimes to suggest structure for long pieces. I actually try to learn better writing style from this (often making some or all of the s

    • What's surprising is, even though you hit all of the things that were signaling AI, this still reads like something a human wrote. I wonder why?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chefren ( 17219 )

        Maybe because it was?

        I also find that I find more and more channels on Youtube where a human is reading what sounds like an AI assisted script, as it's full of these same AI-isms. It's annoying when everyone starts sounding the same even when they are reading from a script.

        • I particularly loathe the AI animated historical and scientific explainers produced by AI. For example, you get a neat simple story about something interesting like the evolution of clothing in hominids [youtube.com], and you wonder what has scientific backing and what is hallucinated.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            If you're watching some random thing on YouTube you should be wondering that regardless of whether it sounds like it was written by an LLM or not.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Wow. This statement is basically empty while using complexity to obscure that fact. I would applaud you, but I have seen similar quite when correcting exams...

      Stil a work of art.

  • A new tool that's really good at written language is being used by folks to edit copy. And the unsavory are using it to externalize costs and monetize slop. All this seems to distract everyone from the big issues like ownership and mass surveillance.

  • Expect AI-written material to be put through a "cleanup to make it look less like AI and more like a person" post-processing step in the very near future.

    It's probably already happening.

    • It's already happening. And the post processing is being done (surprise) by AI: https://github.com/hardikpandy... [github.com]

      • Indeed, standard practice for students. A few rough gramars, uneven paragraphs, and no em dashes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      That won't come like you think for too long. If there is a known method to make it "look human" you can also train the neural network to change its output toward "looking human" and soon skip the intermediate tool.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      No post processing needed. LLMs sound like they do because that style was prominent in their training data and was scored highly by their trainers. If you ask most of the language models not to use excessive punctuation, lists, headings, polish your knob, and write at a grade six level, they generally sound reasonably human.

  • Yeah there have been tons of spam site popping up that are now produced with AI text instead of less sophisticated templates, it would be interesting to see if there's a downtick in the previous spam site markers.

  • Google Search results are a joke these days.
    Maybe Firefox should build a filter deleting all such pages.

  • Standardize a 2-day work week. Every senior people still needed, every junior person still needed. Training funnel still in place. Consumer markets still in place (or better). Everyone gets a better life. No one brings out the pitchforks. Thank God for AIs extra productivity! (Will it happen? Probably not)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Unfettered human greed will prevent that from happening. Unless we have put a pretty low cap on individual wealth, say 10-50M EUR or so and make circumvention an immediate "you loose everything" event. I would be all for that.

      Reminds me of some medieval cultures that needed about 2-3 days of work per week to sustain themselves comfortably. Seems we have regressed from that, mostly because some really big assholes cannot get enough.

      • Reminds me of some medieval cultures that needed about 2-3 days of work per week to sustain themselves comfortably. Seems we have regressed from that, mostly because some really big assholes cannot get enough.

        Those were hunter-gatherer cultures, not medieval.
        Hunter-gatherer cultures produce minimal amounts of science, math, writing, medicine, art, clothing, or anything else. They work enough to survive.

    • My theory is all the jobs Ai replaces are BS anyway. Consider this, in 1950 an entry level construction worker made minimum wage, $1/hr which entitled him to 1/8000th of a median $8000 house. Today he makes $20/hr, which entitles him to 1/20,000th of median $400,000 house. In every single productive basic life field itâ(TM)s the same, both for workers and businesses, the share they get of what the life basics they produce is less, even as efficiency producing them increases.

      The reason why is an ever gr

  • I'm curious how they dealt with the fact the language changes over time. It makes sense that people writing after AI would write more like an AI than people from before AI.

    • They deal with it by adding 'likely' in the conclusions.

      I believe their conclusions though. But they also say 'significant signs of AI authorship' which is very stretchable and more cautious compared to other studies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        The methods the summary implies that they use are quite unreliable on an individual basis, but probably pretty good on a population level. So talking about the increase in frequency is probably valid.

    • Re:Confounding variables (Score:4, Interesting)

      by allo ( 1728082 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @03:35PM (#66305032)

      There were already studies on that. Many YouTubers started sounding like chatgpt even when not reading some text. You will even have second level effects like people never having used ChatGPT learning ChatGPT-speak from news articles they consume.

      • If ChatGPT can teach idiots that they very much "couldn't care less" when they say they "could care less" then all the power use, emissions, and water consumption will have been worthwhile.

  • That last one really chaps my hide. Those mountains of fake drama posts punctuated by the 'negative parallelism' structure (now I have a name for the thing I hate.) It's everywhere and it's infuriating.

    All you can do is try to ignore it and focus on your own (AI-free) stuff. Of course anything you post online will then become free AI fodder. It's hard to get away from it.

  • Some people write their love letters with the "help" of a LLM. Politicians write speeches, teachers write their report cards, managers the reports on their underlings and so on. Except for having an empty mind and being an imbecile, there's not much of an excuse for doing so.

  • is this really news? (Score:5, Funny)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @02:57AM (#66304020)
    I don't see why this is shocking news. HTML is 90s technology and then they added on CSS and JavaScript. It is painful to work with. And typing a lot of words is what AI is good at.

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bruce66423 ( 1678196 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @03:31AM (#66304032)

    If the product is an easily read, accurate website, that's a good outcome. Is writing website content a job we ought to worry about protecting? Next you'll suggest that writing user help screens that said nothing of value was worthwhile (yes I'm still resentful about that 35 years on).

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@[ ] ... t ['ear' in gap]> on Monday August 24, 2026 @09:27AM (#66304394)

      You left out informative, but otherwise I pretty much agree with you. The problem is that I expect MANY jobs are going to evaporate. Whether enough new jobs will appear (that are easy to cross-train into) is another question, and I really find it dubious.

      We won't find out the answer this year, but we may find out next year.

    • If the product is an easily read, accurate website, that's a good outcome.

      I suppose. I find AI prose increasingly-grating. I have to read it all day while working and when I hit some web page that uses all the same obnoxious phrasing and structure I tend to just close the tab and look for a different source.

  • What is the point of having an AI write your website? You may as well not do it, because nobody will visit it anyways. People will just as the LLM directly. Talk about self-defeating stupidity.

    • So if a person has a business and they want a website, you are suggesting that they should type it all out manually or find someone who knows how to? You know you can proof read and get the AI to change anything you don't like.
    • Those that don't natively, or just don't know English, want a web presence that makes advertising money. Bam AI slopped website that offers nothing but repeating paragraphs of drivel about the same topic that your search terms hit.

      It's always about the money. If AI powered searches make those types of websites dry up - did we win or lose? I don't think you can win anything with AI unless you are trying to cheat someone.

      - On another note I'm getting tired of the Chrome spell checker underlining words t

    • The point is: people do not know HTML etc. and just want to sell cakes.
      The point is: they are starting now to sell cakes and do not have the funds to pay 30 hours of my work - without AI.
      But they have the funds to pay me one hour - with AI.

  • With newspages its easily detectable, if the article is long, and repeats a lot of passages, and has many ads interweaven, you know its mainly written by AI.

  • Oxford commas increased 63% (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24, 2026 @07:43AM (#66304278)

    There's no such thing as an "oxford" comma. There is just a comma. Some people choose to incorrectly omit the comma that precedes the final element in a list.

    • Oxford commas are called that because omitting them is specifically not incorrect. In fact quite a few writing style guides specify to not use them.

      You may not like it, that doesn't make it incorrect.
      On the flip side pretending it doesn't exist very much makes you incorrect, especially considering the oxford comma is specifically defined and discussed in writing style guides.

  • it's coming from both directions (Score:4, Funny)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @07:48AM (#66304280) Journal

    On the one hand, ai is indeed getting better at writing banal fluff pieces that fill the Internet.

    On the other, human writing is growing so awful in both subject and quality (this morning's bbc contains an article where one of their interns sprightly explains she's been able to train her self to wake without an alarm clock, golly!) that little of value is being supplanted.

    Hell, I expect an ai editor of slashdot would post fewer dupes and likely be better at summarizing the point rather than cnp'ing whole 1000-word articles for the front page.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gleenie ( 412916 )

      Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. But those are, to quote the movie, rookie numbers. The great AI productivity gains have enabled us to pump those numbers up to 99%. What a time to be alive!

  • NOBODY write HTML code by hand these days, 1991 was a long time ago.

  • I find the AI detectors more suspect than the Dark Web..

    Snake oil is what those detectors are. Their false positive rate is huge.

  • There are some very obvious errors in their methodology if they've claimed to find "significant signs of AI authorship" in webpages that were written before ChatGPT.

  • If the way they detect AI involvement is noting the correct use of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, does that mean humans have forgotten how to write?
  • Language use and proper punctuation is not a sign of AI. I refuse to NOT use the Oxford Comma. I know a lot of professional copy-writers who use the em dash. And some of us have linguistic skills and use words like "delve", because they sound fun.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      The thing is, even when your article is not AI, there are more AI articles. Look at some statistical distribution of articles with oxford comma before AI and the distribution after. The distribution after shows there are way more oxford comma articles. That doesn't tell that any specific one has to be AI, but it tells that the number of AI articles grew.

  • If 1/3 of webpages are written by AI, humanity is doomed and the world sucks....because that means the majority are scams. No legit business would have an AI write their webpage without HEAVY editing...only phishing scammers would do that. However, it's foolish not to use AI to fix your grammar mistakes or make you a better writer. That's like complaining about someone using a ruler to help them draw a straight line.
  • One third of accessible pages, maybe. From my job I see a lot of slop news and fake blogs, various clickbait scams and such. So I might believe that one third of the pages on the network are AI generated. That is not the same as saying one third of the pages a real person ever intentionally looks at are AI generated.

    • Most the web was already slop for SEO or marketing.

      I would think the quality of the HTML would improve since HTML generation software often writes poor quality HTML that is just good enough to work in Chrome. The frameworks out there violate tons of things and accessibility is going back down hill again. We have HTML giving in to all the invented html elements and standardizing common violations which became worse once we standardized error handling to the point people engineered around the error handling.

  • How much of website design / coding is fascinating or worth getting into?

    Let me make several points clear, if you're just starting, or you want to explore web development as a hobby, please don't use AI, learn how to design good websites. Learn what a DIV is, what an SPAN is for, get into the weeds of WCAG, and really learn what makes a website work and function. Figure out what Angular is, and React is, and play around with designing TypeScript and JavaScript, and don't approach AI until you have the s

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