An analysis of Internet Archive data: by mid-2025, ~35% of newly published websites since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 were AI-generated or AI-assisted
Researchers found the internet is becoming aggressively positive as AI-generated text floods the web.
404 MediaMatthew Gault
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier coverage tracked AI text tools moving into books and personalized articles, with fewer clients purchasing human-written work. This analysis supplies a broader measure of how far that supply-side shift has reached across newly published sites.
The related coverage also shows AI retrieval-bot traffic rising at publishers, linking the growth in machine-produced content to a web increasingly mediated by AI systems rather than only conventional site visits.
First-order effects
AI-assisted production has become a material part of the new-site supply, giving publishers and site operators a lower-friction way to publish at volume.
Human writers and other creators face a larger pool of machine-assisted substitutes, extending the client-pressure described in earlier coverage.
Second-order effects
As content supply expands, publishers have stronger incentives to distinguish original work and to manage how AI retrieval systems access and surface it.
AI retrieval and answer products gain a larger corpus to process, making distribution through AI interfaces more consequential for publishers than direct page traffic alone.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, the web’s economics may increasingly separate low-cost content generation from scarce inputs such as trusted sourcing, editorial judgment, and audience distribution.
The combination of AI-generated supply and AI-mediated retrieval could intensify pressure for publisher controls over indexing and reuse, though the corpus does not establish which control models will prevail.
The trend: This is part of the industrialization of web content: generative AI is changing both how material is produced and how audiences encounter it.
We have lots of anecdotal evidence about what AI does to the internet. Now we're seeing a new wave of research, including a new paper from Stanford and the Internet Archive that puts the number of AI websites at around 35%—and draws some surprising conclusions: www.wired.com/sto…
The future is now: 35% of newly published websites were AI-generated or AI-assisted last year, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 www.404media.co/study-finds- ...
Dead Internet Theory update: 1 in 3 websites are now AI-generated Up from ~0 in just ***3 years*** And this is as of mid-2025 - nearly a year ago AIs sucked at coding back then - it could be over 50% now! Soon: 99% “I find the sheer speed of the AI takeover of the web [image]
🚨 The authors found that, by mid-2025, 35% of newly published websites were AI-generated or AI-assisted (up from zero before ChatGPT's launch). Interesting paper on the impact of AI-generated text on the internet, relying on data from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. [imag…
This is EXTREMELY cool and — for people that are tracking my shit — the frontier: whereas before I was tracking mass-produced political language and the effects of that on private reasoning and public discourse the frontier has now moved to mass-produced LLM language
We collaborated with researchers at Stanford, Imperial College, and the Internet Archive to investigate public perception of AI's prevalence on the internet. In 2025, 35% of newly published websites on the open internet were AI-generated or AI-assisted. Internet users are [image]