UC Berkeley and University of Washington study: As of August 2026, about 24% of crawlable web pages contain AI-generated or edited text
A new study by UC Berkeley and the University of Washington shows that as of August 2026, about 24% of crawlable web pages contain AI-generated or AI-edited text, whereas before 2022 this proportion was almost zero. The study drew 5.1 million web pages in various languages from Common Crawl snapshots from 2019 to 2026, used statistical models to correct false positives and false negatives of various detectors, and used pre-2022 web pages as a near-AI-free baseline. The annual growth nearly doubled, rising from 4.6 percentage points from early 2023 to early 2025 to 8.1 percentage points thereafter; small, sparsely linked sites contributed 78.8% of the increase, while the most central sites were the least likely to contain AI text.
Why read this
AI score 66
The study used a sample of 5.1 million web pages to quantify the spread of AI-generated text and noted that growth is mainly driven by small sites.
Topics
Body
New study from UC Berkeley and Univ of Washington found that about 24% of crawlable webpages held AI-generated or AI-edited text by August 2026, up from almost none before 2022.
They sampled 5.1M pages from Common Crawl snapshots spanning 2019 to 2026, in every language. A statistical model corrected for each detector's false alarms and misses, using pre-2022 pages as a near-AI-free baseline.
Yearly growth nearly doubled, from 4.6 points between early 2023 and early 2025 to 8.1 points after that. Small, little-linked sites drove 78.8% of the rise, while the most central sites were least likely to have AI text.