Our newsletterIndependent researchPew Research Center, 20 Aug 2026
10% of English-language webpages in July 2026 showed strong signs of AI authorship
Content production
10%
of English-language webpages in a July 2026 sample showed strong signs of AI authorship
- Reader Note:
- "Strong signs" is the stricter of the two thresholds this study uses — the looser one puts over a third of post-2022 pages in scope — and neither threshold is stated as a score. English-language pages only, so nothing here describes the web in other languages.
- Evidence:
- Observed behaviour
- Vendor interest:
- None
- Sample:
- Analysis of about 490,000 English-language webpages from the Common Crawl web archive over the past five years, including a random sample of 10,000 webpages from July 2026.
Reader Note:
Evidence:
Vendor interest:
Sample:Good for
Comparing yourself against a similar segment, and choosing what to test next.
Not for
- Saying that one thing caused another, or predicting what you would get.
- This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
- Nobody counted this directly — it's a calculation. The publisher worked it out itself, or took the ad platform's word for what its ads achieved.
- The source never says how this number was measured.
Related cards
Content productionIdea
Google now instructs that all AI-generated content must be manually fact-checked and reviewed before publishing
Idea
Trend
Go deeper on this topic
Our Substack turns the data behind these cards into full breakdowns: what changed, why, and what to do about it.
