The news: 35% of webpages published after ChatGPT launched in late 2022 show AI authorship signals, per a July 2026 Pew Research survey of 10,000 random webpages. Across all publication dates, 9.6% of .com websites show significant signs of AI authorship or AI editing.

AI writing signs are also getting more consistent.

• Em dashes appear about twice as frequently today as they did in 2023, and Oxford comma appearances are up 63%.
• Use of negative parallelism in sentences—“It’s not just X, it’s Y”—has nearly tripled, but remains rare.

What it means: The same AI models that are helping organizations increase output are pushing their language and creative closer together.

• AI “tells” are becoming more commonplace, introducing user distrust around whether the content they’re seeing online is real and whether humans are in the loop.
• Users also may not trust product quality or brand identity claims if web or social content is clearly AI-generated. That's especially true for Gen Zers, 74% of whom have a slightly or very negative opinion toward brand content made with AI, per Rival Technologies.

AI systems are changing the economics of content itself, as churning out exponentially more content isn’t as valuable as being unique when it comes to competing with other brands.

Recommendations for brands: AI offers unprecedented content production assistance while making scale itself less valuable. Those AI efficiencies remain important, but brands need to invest in providing AI with proprietary assets to get unique outputs.

Showcase real customer experiences, use recognizable voices and creators, and offer accurate product information and original research to produce content that other brands’ queries can’t generate.

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