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More than a third of new websites on the Internet were created with the help of AI. This is evidenced by a study published by researchers from Imperial College London, Stanford University, and representatives of the Internet Archive. The data was collected by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine service from the end of 2022 to mid-2025. The researchers claim that as of May 2025, 35.3% of new websites were created using AI, and 17.6% of them were fully generated by AI. It seems that the theory of the “dead Internet” is gradually being realized (if you haven’t heard about it before, we have an article on our website).
For those who believe in the “dead internet” theory, these data are quite clear. Moreover, they are consistent with previous estimates. In September 2025, Cloudflare reported that almost a third of all Internet traffic was generated by bots. A few days later, the company’s CEO Matthew Prince stated in a podcast that, according to his “disturbingly likely” forecast, AI will change the way information is disseminated online and concentrate control over it in the hands of a few tech giants.
Earlier, Imperva, a cybersecurity company, reported that in 2024, automated activity on the Internet exceeded human activity for the first time, accounting for about half of all traffic. The report noted that this is “mainly due to the rapid spread of artificial intelligence and large language models.” Fraudsters often use AI tools to create fake web resources to mislead people. AI is also used to plagiarize news and create low-quality websites for SEO optimization.
Internet Archive’s research went further, as experts wanted to find out whether bots are already dominating the Internet and what consequences this has. Many people fear that the language and accuracy of online content will change as the role of AI grows. As part of the study, researchers tested six assumptions that most adults in the United States allegedly share about the future of the Internet dominated by AI content. Two of them were confirmed.
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In particular, the researchers found that AI-generated content is not as factually inaccurate as expected. Contrary to popular belief, it contains references to sources through external links, does not destroy the individual writing style, and is not a continuous “sheet” of text without meaning. At the same time, as predicted, the growing share of AI content leads to a decrease in “a wide range of original ideas and diverse points of view” and an increase in texts that “look increasingly sterile and artificially optimistic.”
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recognized this problem of artificial positivity. Last year, after the launch of the Codex AI programming agent, he noted that the overly enthusiastic reviews of the release in the r/Claudecode subreddit partially looked like they were generated by bots.
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This research is just the beginning and could become a useful tool for determining the reliability of information on the Internet. The researchers say they are already working on creating a “tool” to monitor this phenomenon and better understand which types of sites are most affected, as well as to analyze the extent of these changes in more detail. Meanwhile, the theory of the “dead Internet” is gaining more and more supporters.
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