Creeping AI: One in three new web pages weren't generated by a human | The National
Creeping AI: One in three new web pages weren't generated by a human | The National
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Creeping AI: One in three new web pages not generated by humans
Research reveals extent artificial intelligence is reshaping online content
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Creeping AI: One in three new web pages not generated by humans
Research reveals extent artificial intelligence is reshaping online content
Fadah Jassem
September 02, 2026
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You've probably read something online recently and wondered: was this written by AI? There's a good chance it was.
New research from the Pew Research Centre, in the US, examined hundreds of thousands of web pages to measure how often they showed signs of AI generation or editing.
Our chart of the week shows that web pages published after ChatGPT was released in November 2022 exhibit significant AI involvement, at 35 per cent, or more than one in three.
This figure drops to 9.6 per cent when pages created before the release of ChatGPT are included in the sample for that period, revealing how much AI has become a feature of content generation.
Our second chart shows that before ChatGPT's release, signs of AI involvement were virtually non-existent at around 1 per cent. But from late 2022, after the launch of ChatGPT, the share began to climb. As Claude, Gemini and other generative AI tools became part of everyday content production, that trend continued.
But the chart also shows something else. It also highlights the gap in uptake of AI-generated content across different online domains. In a sample that traced sites before and after the release of ChatGPT, 9.3 per cent of .com web pages showed significant signs of AI-generated content in 2026, roughly twice the rate of .org pages (4.6 per cent).
The proportion was much lower for .edu and .gov domains, at around 1 per cent. This suggests that many educational and government institutions are choosing not to use AI-generated content on official web pages.
Another study, by Graphite Growth, examined the impact of AI specifically on published articles and suggested that, for the first time, AI has been responsible for writing as many online articles as humans.
What is the internet starting to sound like?
The Pew research