More than a third of new websites on the internet were created by AI, according to a paper published online by researchers from Imperial College London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive.
The study is based on data collected by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from late 2022 (when ChatGPT kicked off the AI craze) to mid-2025. As of May 2025, the researchers found that 35.3% of all newly published websites on the internet were created with the assistance of AI, including 17.6% of websites that were completely AI-generated.
That might not totally shock you if you subscribe to the Dead Internet Theory, aka the belief that most of the internet is driven by bot activity, with its more conspiratorial proponents claiming this is being done on purpose to control the public.
The rough figure the researchers have found is also in line with previous findings. Cloudflare reported in September 2025 that nearly one-third of all internet traffic was driven by bots. A few days later, the company’s CEO, Matthew Prince, appeared on a podcast to share his “frighteningly likely” forecast that AI will completely change the way information is shared online, and concentrate power over this online knowledge in the hands of a few tech giants.
An even earlier report from data security company Imperva claimed that automated surfing surpassed human activity on the internet for the first time in 2024, making up roughly half of all web traffic. The report concluded that this was “largely driven by the rapid adoption of AI and large language models.”
There is some anecdotal evidence that shows just how pervasive AI-generated websites have become across the internet, too. Scammers are using AI tools to rapidly generate fake websites to trick victims. AI is also being used to plagiarize news organizations and create trash websites for the sole purpose of SEO-farming.
A new report by Model Republic also claims that a website linked to OpenAI-backed super PAC Leading The Future was publishing an onslaught of mostly AI-generated “news” articles to attack critics of artificial intelligence products.
But the Internet Archive study goes even further than previous evidence, exploring whether bots have taken over the internet and whether this is leading to the widely anticipated outcomes. Many people fear that as AI infiltrates the internet, the language and accuracy of the internet will change along with it. In the study, the researchers tested six beliefs that they said the majority of U.S. adults hold about an online future dominated by AI content. But they found only two of those hypotheses to be playing out.
The researchers found that AI-generated online content wasn’t as factually incorrect as expected. They also found that it cited its sources through external links, didn’t extinguish individual writing styles in favor of a generic voice, and wasn’t a long, winding block of text with little meaningful information, despite common belief.
But, what they did find, as expected, was that more AI content meant less “range of unique ideas and diverse viewpoints” and writing that “feels increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.”
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted to this fake positivity. Last year, after the company released its AI coding agent Codex, Altman said that the intense praise for the release on the subreddit r/Claudecode felt somewhat bot-driven.
This study is just the beginning, and could become a useful tool to help users discern credible information on the internet. The researchers told 404 Media this week that they were working on creating “a continuous tool” to monitor this phenomenon and understand “which kinds of websites are most affected, broken down by category or language, and generally providing more nuance about where these impacts are landing.”
