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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 between 2019 and 2026, used statistical models to correct for false positives and false negatives across detectors, and used pre-2022 web pages as a near-AI-free baseline. The annual growth nearly doubled, rising from 4.6 percentage points between early 2023 and early 2025 to 8.1 percentage points thereafter; small, sparsely linked sites accounted for 78.8% of the increase, while the most central sites were the least likely to contain AI text.
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Oct 30
Rohan Paul
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.