Editorial illustration for AI made up over a third of new sites by 2025; Pope warning flagged as AI
AI-Generated Content Dominates Over One-Third of Web Sites
AI made up over a third of new sites by 2025; Pope warning flagged as AI
AI-generated text now accounts for more than a third of new websites. That figure comes from researchers at Stanford University, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive, who published their findings this month. They used tools from the company Pangram to make their assessment. The company’s CEO, Max Spero, describes his job as that of a “slop janitor.” He told WIRED his team’s new browser extension can instantly check for AI content across any site a user visits.
Text generated at least in part by AI accounts for more than a third of all new websites as of 2025, according to a study published this month by researchers at Stanford University, the Imperial College of London, and the Internet Archive. (The researchers used earlier Pangram tools to arrive at their findings.) It's this mess that Max Spero, CEO of Pangram and a self-professed "slop janitor," wants to help clean up. He tells WIRED that adding instant analysis to the company's browser extension offers people a more seamless way of checking for AI content across the sites they frequent.
Pangram’s tool flagged even a papal warning about the dangers of AI as likely machine-generated. The finding makes the scale of the shift concrete: when official cautions about synthetic content can themselves be synthetic, the baseline for what’s real online has moved. Tools like Spero’s offer a check, but the bigger problem of what to do with a web saturated by AI text remains for platforms and their users.
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Common Questions Answered
How much of new websites are estimated to be AI-generated by 2025?
According to a study by researchers from Stanford University, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive, over one-third of new websites are expected to contain text generated at least partially by AI by 2025. This finding highlights the rapid integration of AI-generated content across the digital landscape.
Who is Max Spero and what is his role in addressing AI-generated content?
Max Spero is the CEO of Pangram and describes himself as a 'slop janitor' who aims to help clean up the proliferation of AI-generated content online. His company is working on tools and methods to analyze and potentially mitigate the spread of AI-generated text across websites.
What triggered the research into AI-generated website content?
The research was sparked by a viral statement attributed to the Pope that was flagged as AI-generated by a detection tool, which prompted researchers to investigate the broader phenomenon of AI masquerading as human-generated content. This curiosity led to a systematic audit of domains launched in the past two years using the Pangram suite of tools.
