35% of the modern web is AI-written — and bots are reading it

a pew research study analyzing nearly half a million english-language webpages found that over one-third (35%) of content published after chatgpt's launch shows signs of ai authorship. this contrasts sharply with pre-2022 data and creates a feedback loop where bots increasingly browse content created by other bots, as cloudflare recently noted bot traffic surpassed human traffic. the trend is heavily skewed toward commercial .com domains, which show ai usage at ten times the rate of institutional .edu or .gov domains, suggesting that low-cost content generation is reshaping the commercial web.