Pew finds AI signs on 9.35% of .com pages

Pew Research Center found signs of AI authorship or substantial AI editing on 9.35% of .com webpages sampled in January 2026, after analyzing nearly 490,000 English-language pages from Common Crawl with Open Pangram, compared with 4.59% of .org pages and roughly 1% of .edu and .gov pages in the same sample, according to Pew’s web-authorship analysis. The researchers caution that detectors can misclassify individual pages, so the result is a population signal rather than a verdict on any URL. Publishers and AI-search teams should track provenance and editorial quality as first-class data: the web’s commercial layer is becoming synthetic faster than its institutional layer, complicating both retrieval and trust in AI-search referral measurement.