A recent study by the Pew Research Centre shows that the number of AI writing traces in English Internet content is increasing rapidly. The research team extracted approximately 490,000 English-language pages from the Common Crawl web file, covering the period January 2021 to July 2026, and analysed them using the AI Testing Model Open Pangram.

ChatGPT has increased to 35%.

The results show that about 10% of the sample pages in July 2026 showed clear signs of AI writing. If only the pages published after ChatGPT went online in November 2022, the percentage rises to 35%.

Increase differences in domain names

The study found that AI writing traces were not evenly distributed. About 10%,.edu and.gov are close to 1% and.org about 4.6%. According to Pew, the performance of these domain names was approximately similar in 2021.

  • About 10% of the.com page shows AI writing signs
  • .edu and.gov are close to 1%
  • .org Pages About 4.6%

The recognition basis is from text mode

This study does not directly determine whether the content was written by AI through a single term, but is based on statistical characterization in a large text. The study mentioned that the frequency of use of dashes was approximately doubled, with an increase of 63 per cent in the Oxford comma and a marked increase in the terminology common in parts of the AI text.

Moreover, the phrase "not X, but Y" has nearly tripled since 2023, although the whole is still not common. Pew at the same time cautions that the test model may still be miscalculated, so that "obvious AI writing signs" do not mean that the entire content is entirely machine-generated.

Commercial websites are being used faster

The study found that this discrepancy related to the distribution process. University and government websites usually require longer review cycles, while commercial websites cover news, marketing and content farms, making it easier to use AI-assisted writing on a large scale.

In terms of time, the percentage of AI writing signs on the.com page has risen from about 1% in January 2021 to 9.35% in January 2026. It was also mentioned that companies such as Anthropic were advancing model-level text fingerprinting techniques to improve the accuracy of AI text recognition.