Pew put half a million web pages through a detector: a third of everything published since ChatGPT carries its marks
The Pew Research Center pulled roughly 490,000 English-language web pages out of the Common Crawl archive, covering the past five years, and ran them through a detection tool called Open Pangram. In a random sample of 10,000 pages captured in July 2026, one in ten showed significant signs of having been written with AI help. Narrow the sample to pages that first appeared after ChatGPT's release in late 2022, and the figure passes one third. The curve starts bending upward exactly when ChatGPT launched and keeps rising as Claude, Gemini and the rest arrive. Pew is careful about what it is claiming: the detector flags signs that a machine had a hand in the text, not that a page was written entirely by one.
Why it mattersUntil now the scale of machine-written text on the open web has been guesswork, argued from small samples or from vendors selling detection. This is a large, documented count from an organisation with no product to sell, and it puts a number on something that affects everyone who reads or searches: a growing share of what a search engine returns was drafted with the same tools that answer your questions. It also matters for the models themselves, which are trained on this same web — each generation now learns from a corpus its predecessors helped write.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
A model learned to write without the method that trains every AI.2026-10-06Mathematicians cracked five open problems using an ordinary chat box.
2026-10-05Untuned models solved agent tasks their polished versions could not.
2026-10-04Pretraining on everyday photos got a model to 70% on a reasoning test.
2026-10-04An AI trained for $8,000 beat Stratego's greatest player.
2026-10-03