The internet has an AI problem as machines write more of the web

If so much of what you read online is starting to sound like it was written by the same person, you're probably not imagining it.

A new analysis of nearly half a million English-language webpages by Pew Research suggests that 35% of pages published after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch show significant signs of AI authorship.

Researchers used the Common Crawl web archive to examine webpages published over five years, running their text through an AI detection model called Open Pangram. In a random sample of 10,000 webpages collected in July 2026, about 10% showed significant signs of AI authorship. But when older pages were excluded, that figure rose to more than one in three.

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The pattern is particularly pronounced on commercial websites. About one in 10 .com web domains in the 2026 sample showed signs of AI authorship, compared with 4.6% of .org domains and roughly 1% each of .edu and .gov domains.

That's perhaps unsurprising since much of the commercial web runs on a set formula of content — product descriptions, reviews, explainers, SEO articles, listicles and how-to guides — that needs to be produced quickly and cheaply. AI just happens to be very good at exactly that.

A December 2025 analysis published by The Conversation, citing research from digital marketing firm Graphite, pointed to a similar trend. Graphite examined more than 65,000 randomly selected online articles and found that more than half were being generated by AI. Much of that content was general-interest material such as news updates, how-to guides, reviews, lifestyle pieces and product explainers.

Spotting the bot

AI's influence is also beginning to show up in the language of the web.

Em dashes are now used roughly twice as often as they were in 2023. Oxford commas are up 63%, while words such as "delve", "interplay" and "testament" have more than doubled. A rhetorical construction along the lines of "it's not just X, it's Y" has nearly tripled.

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However, it is worth noting that none of this is proof that a particular sentence was written by AI. Humans use em dashes. Humans use Oxford commas. Some humans probably genuinely like "delve". But across hundreds of thousands of pages, these patterns begin to reveal a broader shift.

Internet by the bot, for the bot

And while the machines are writing the web, they're also increasingly reading it.

Separately, data from cybersecurity firm Cloudflare showed that 61.8% of web requests came from bots, compared with 38.2% from humans.

This is being driven partly by AI agents — programs that can browse websites, gather information and use online tools with relatively little human intervention.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince flagged bot traffic overtaking human traffic in June 2026 and said that he predicted this to happen at the “end of 2027 or early 2027”. “The agentic traffic [is] growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the internet’s history,” he added.

In India, the internet traffic is still largely driven by humans at 77.6% as compared to bots (22.4%). Whereas in countries like Jordan, bot traffic has risen as high as 74% in August 2026 vs humans (26%).