Study Finds a Third of New Websites Are AI-Generated
A study by researchers from Stanford, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive found that 35% of new websites since 2022 are AI-generated or AI-assisted. The research analyzed web content from August 2022 to May 2025 and found AI-generated text is less diverse semantically and more positive in tone. Contrary to concerns, the study did not find evidence that AI-generated content increases false statements or fails to cite sources.
- ▪Researchers found that 35% of newly published websites by mid-2025 were AI-generated or AI-assisted.
- ▪The study used Pangram v3, an AI-detection tool, to identify AI-generated websites from archived snapshots via the Wayback Machine.
- ▪AI-generated text was found to be more positive and less semantically diverse, but did not show increased falsehoods or lack of source citations.
- ▪Human fact-checkers were employed to verify factual claims in AI-generated content as part of the study.
- ▪The research team plans to develop a continuous monitoring tool with the Internet Archive to track AI's impact on the web.
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| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/study-finds-a-third-of-new-websites-are-ai-generated/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:14:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T17:34:02.582Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T17:34:02.582Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 97YUXyHGG4dB · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Researchers working with data from the Internet Archive have discovered that a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. The team of researchers—which includes people from Stanford, the Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive—published their findings online in a paper titled “The Impact of AI-Generated Text on the Internet.” The research also found that all this AI-generated text is making the web more cheery and less verbose.Inspired by the Dead Internet Theory—the idea that much of the internet is now just bots talking back and forth—the team set out to find out how ChatGPT and its competitors had reshaped the internet since 2022.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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