Our newsletterIndependent researchPew Research Center, 20 Aug 2026
The "it's not just X, it's Y" construction nearly tripled on the web, though it remains uncommon
Content production
- Reader Note:
- Pew tracks this as one stylistic fingerprint of AI writing, not as a measure of AI use on its own. The card carries no base, and that is the point to hold on to: tripling from a very low share still leaves it rare, and the report does not say what share of pages carry it now. Style is also weaker evidence than the detector-based estimates in the same study, since a human writer can reach for the same construction.
- 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.
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