Study Finds A Third of New Websites are AI-Generated

· ai · Source ↗

TLDR

  • Stanford, Imperial College, and Internet Archive researchers found 35% of new websites since ChatGPT’s 2022 launch are AI-generated or AI-assisted.

Key Facts

  • By mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before late 2022.
  • Researchers sampled websites via the Wayback Machine across 33 months (August 2022 to May 2025) and used Pangram v3 for AI detection.
  • Of six hypothesized harms, only two were confirmed: AI text is making the web less semantically diverse and more uniformly positive.
  • Truth decay was not confirmed; human fact-checkers found no measurable increase in verifiably false statements in AI-generated sites.

Why It Matters

  • The share of AI-generated web content rose from zero to 35% in under three years, a pace researchers describe as staggering.
  • The team is working with the Internet Archive to turn this into a continuous monitoring tool rather than a one-time study.

Matthew Gault, 404 Media · 2026-04-27 · Read the original

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