Emerging uses of AI chatbots for news and what it means for journalism (Digital News Report 2026)

Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism · 2026-06-16

The rapid rise of generative AI has become a growing focus for journalism, as publishers and platforms grapple with what it means for how people access and engage with news. Much of the attention has so far centred on how newsrooms can use AI to produce or distribute content more efficiently. But at the same time, a small but growing share of the public is beginning to use these tools directly to get news, as chatbots become more embedded in everyday digital life.

Recent evidence points to a sharp increase in AI use overall. The Generative AI and news report 2025 found that weekly use of generative AI tools across six markets grew from 18% to 34% between 2024 and 2025 (Simon et al. 2025). In this chapter, we examine the emergence of standalone AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini as a source of news, looking at who is using them, what they are used for, and how these behaviours may shape engagement with, and traffic to, original sources.

In our data this year, we find evidence of rising weekly use of AI chatbots for news, up from 7% to 10% globally since last year, driven largely by growth in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as Southern and Eastern Europe – markets where platformisation of news is stronger. While this is still a fairly small minority of the population, the figure represents a substantial relative increase and indicates that AI is beginning to play a more meaningful role in news consumption alongside established pathways. However, only 1% say AI is their main source of news, suggesting it currently plays a complementary role for most users.

Uptake of AI chatbots, both in general and for news, continues to be driven by younger people, typically at the forefront of tech adoption, including AI. The proportion of respondents in the youngest age group using chatbots for news (17%) is three times higher than that in the oldest age group (5%), although the most significant growth relative to 2025 was recorded among those 25–34 (up 4pp).

Much of this uptake is concentrated among people already engaged with news. Usage is considerably higher among news lovers (18% among these most intensive news consumers compared to 7% among those who get news just once a day) and is also higher among those with high interest in news (19% among those who are extremely interested relative to 7% among those not very interested). This helps explain why we also see higher use among those on the political extremes, who also tend to skew more interested in news: 16% and 15% among those very left and right wing, respectively.

Another factor shaping the uptake of AI chatbots for news is how much people trust the quality of their outputs. In a context of already low trust in news (37% of people trust most news most of the time), this year's data show that trust in news from AI chatbots among the general population is lower still at just 20% globally. However, a different picture emerges when looking at those who use these tools: 44% of AI chatbot users express trust in news from AI chatbots, compared with just 17% of non-users, which highlights both the extent to which low trust is driven by people who aren’t using the technology and the extent to which users think it performs reasonably well.

When we plot AI chatbot usage against trust at the market level, we see a strong relationship: markets with higher trust in AI chatbots for news also tend to report higher levels of use. What’s more, as we can see in the next charts, the relationship between trust and use is considerably stronger for AI than for social media, as reflected in the higher R2. The dots sit much closer to the trendline in the first chart, meaning that levels of trust are more consistently proportional to levels of AI chatbot use than for social media. A similar pattern is evident at the individual level. People who trust AI chatbots are several times more likely to use them for news, whereas the relationship is weaker for social media.

This likely reflects differences in how these platforms are used. Using AI chatbots for news is still an emerging and more deliberate behaviour, meaning trust plays an important role in whether people choose to use them at all. By contrast, social media is used for a wide range of purposes, and news is often encountered incidentally, so people may continue to use it for news even if they have lower levels of trust.

So, what exactly are people turning to AI chatbots for when it comes to news? Across 45 markets, asking chatbots a follow-up question is the clear front-runner, reported by 42% of users. A second tier of uses is reported by roughly a third of respondents, spanning several distinct types of uses. Around a third use AI to get the latest news (35%). Similar proportions use it to help simplify news consumption, with 34% using chatbots for summarisation and 30% to make news easier to understand. At the same time, around a third (33%) report a more evaluative use, asking chatbots to assess the reliability of a news source. This highlights the variety of different ways AI can be used for news, beyond what is possible on other platforms.

We can identify some similarities and differences across markets by looking at the rank order of these uses. Across most countries, the dominant use of AI chatbots for news is interrogation, with asking follow-up questions ranking first in 33 of the 45 markets where this question was asked, including Brazil (see chart above). However, other uses are relatively more prominent in different contexts. In Asian markets such as Taiwan and South Korea, where many people are accustomed to getting news from aggregators, simply getting the news is the most frequently cited use. In Canada and the UK, summarisation ranks highest, whereas in Austria the most frequently reported use is making news easier to understand, an application that also ranks highly in Germany and Japan.

Meanwhile, using AI to evaluate news sources ranks highly in markets like Hong Kong and Turkey, which score low in terms of press freedom, as well as markets with lower levels of trust in news, including Hungary and Romania. Finally, some uses remain relatively marginal across countries: asking questions about how the news media work, and converting content between formats, do not rank among the top three uses in any market surveyed.

Another way to understand the uptake of AI chatbots for news is by foregrounding not how people use them but why. Globally, the most commonly cited motivation for using AI chatbots is wanting more depth or explanation (42%), highlighting the interactive nature of these tools. This is followed by an efficiency-driven motivation, with 39% saying AI is faster than other ways of getting news. Several motivations, each mentioned by around a third of respondents, point to AI’s role in helping users process and navigate information: 36% use it to summarise complicated stories, 35% value the sense that they can get an answer to any question, another 35% use it to compile stories from different outlets, and 33% to translate news into their preferred language. In contrast, platform-oriented motivations are less widespread, with 24% saying chatbots are the first place they go for most things and 23% saying they simply prefer interacting with a chatbot.

One of the key concerns among publishers is that growing use of AI chatbots for news will increasingly eat into referral traffic as users get more detailed, personalised answers to their questions within the chatbot environment. In this year’s survey, we tried to get a better handle on this issue by asking those who use standalone AI chatbots for news how often they click through to original news sources. We asked the same of people who use search engines, and also social media, for news to provide points of comparison.

Before turning to the findings, it is important to acknowledge that the data reflect self-reported behaviour, which may under- or overestimate what people do in practice, due to limitations in recall and the tendency to give socially desirable responses. However, the figures give us a starting point to understand differences in click-through intent. It is also worth noting that the rollout of AI-generated summaries in search engines like Google, Bing, and Naver may already be shaping the experiences – and responses – of those using search for news.

This issue underpins industry anxieties about ‘answer engines’, which publishers fear will increasingly satisfy users’ information needs directly within platforms, potentially reducing click-throughs to original sources.