Highly recommended read. AI-written text is everywhere on the web now. This study measured how much.
Lots of interesting insights here.
They found that across more than 5 million crawlable pages from 2019 to 2026, about 24% contained AI-generated or AI-edited text in August 2026, up from near zero before 2022.
The growth rate nearly doubled, from 4.6 points per year between early 2023 and early 2025 to 8.1 points per year since.
About four-fifths of the growth comes from pages on the edge of the web graph, linked from a few well-connected domains. The most central pages are the least likely to contain AI text. English pages have more than other languages, and .gov and .edu pages have far less than .com.
The team uses a Bayesian model to correct for false positives and false negatives in the detector.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36631
Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/the-uneven-rise-of-ai-generated-web-content-2610.36631