AI-written content is everywhere, literally.
Myriad: When will OpenAI release GPT-6? Click to make your prediction.The findings come after researchers pulled roughly 490,000 pages from the Common Crawl web archive, spanning January 2021 through July 2026, then ran the text through Open Pangram, an AI detection model.
The AI fingerprint isn't spread evenly. Pages on .com domains show signs of AI authorship at roughly 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov domains, which sit near 1% each, and about double the 4.6% rate on .org sites.
In 2021, all four domain types looked nearly identical.
How Pew spotted the machines
The detector doesn't flag any single word or phrase but instead weighs statistical patterns across large batches of text. But some individual tells have become sharply more common since 2023: The usual suspects, em dashes (much as we like them ourselves) now appear roughly twice as often, Oxford commas are up 63%, and AI-favored words like "delve," "interplay," and "testament" have more than doubled in frequency.
Pew is careful to note the limits here: detection models can misclassify individual pages in both directions, and "significant signs of AI authorship" doesn't mean a page was written entirely by a machine—plenty of the text was likely AI-assisted rather than AI-generated outright.
Open Pangram comes from Pangram Labs, whose detector has also turned up in separate research finding AI-generated text in roughly 9% of U.S. newspaper articles this year, including opinion pages at outlets like The New York Times.
The domain gap tracks who's publishing and why. Academic and government sites run through editorial review, institutional sign-off, and slower publishing cycles; .com domains include everything from newsrooms to affiliate-marketing content farms churning out pages at a pace no human editor could sustain.
At scale, the trend line is steep regardless: The .com AI-authorship rate climbed from roughly 1% in January 2021 to 9.35% five years later, in January 2026 alone.
