The use of AI chatbots for news is on the rise — but not everywhere

This year’s Digital News Report marked a notable milestone: for the first time, social and video networks overtook news publishers as a source of news globally.

As audiences continue to migrate toward digital intermediaries for news, AI chatbots are emerging as the next platform to watch. Findings from our 2026 survey show that one in 10 people are now using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini for news weekly, up 3 percentage points from last year. (The question asks only about standalone chatbots and not about AI within other platforms, such as AI overviews in search.)

But this uptick is not universal. When comparing across the 48 markets covered, we find that growth tends to be concentrated in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as Southern and Eastern Europe. For example, weekly use doubled from 7% to 14% in South Korea, from 6% to 11% in Peru, and from 4% to 8% in Spain. Meanwhile, in the U.S., use remained stable at 6%. Usage also remained at similar levels to last year in Northern and Western European countries like the U.K. (4%), Germany (5%), and Denmark (5%), where use was already below the global average.

When it comes to news, the geography of chatbot use looks strikingly similar to the geography of platform use more generally: Countries where people already rely more heavily on search engines, social and video networks, and aggregators for news also tend to have higher levels of AI chatbot use for news. This suggests chatbot uptake may be building on existing predispositions to using platforms for news.

Trust may be another reason that adoption differs so widely from one place to another. Markets with higher trust in AI chatbots for news also tend to report higher levels of use. What’s more, the relationship between trust and use is notably stronger for AI than what we observe for social media, perhaps because using a chatbot requires a more active choice. Unlike social media and video networks, where people often stumble across news inadvertently while doing other things, on chatbots, users must intentionally provide a prompt or ask a question, making trust a more significant consideration.

We see a similar pattern at the individual level. Whereas trust in news from AI chatbots tends to be low among the general population (just 20% of people surveyed say they trust in news in outputs from AI chatbots most of the time, compared to 37% who trust news in general), when we zoom in on people who actually use AI chatbots for news, the figure more than doubles, to 44%. This gap show illustrates the extent to which low trust is driven by people who aren’t using the technology for news. However, it also shows how much users seem to think it performs reasonably well.

Age remains one of the strongest dividing lines in chatbot use for news, reflecting the faster uptake of AI among young people more generally. Seventeen percent of people ages 18–24 use AI chatbots for news each week, compared with just 5% of those aged 55 and over. That said, growth over the last year came largely from adults between 25 and 54 years of age. This indicates that AI news use is expanding beyond the earliest adopters. Use is also higher among those who are already engaged with news: 18% among the most intensive news consumers compared to 7% among those who get news only once a day.

However, adoption rates only tell us part of the story. To understand how AI chatbots fit into people’s news habits, we also asked users what they do with them.

Across 45 markets, the most common use was asking a follow-up question about a news story, cited by 42% of chatbot news users. But people are using these tools for a range of other news-related tasks, too. Around a third said they simply ask chatbots for the latest news (35%). Similar numbers use them to summarize a story (34%) or help them evaluate whether a source is trustworthy (33%). And three in ten (30%) use chatbots to make stories easier to understand. Taken together, the findings suggest that people are not just using chatbots to receive news, but also to navigate, interpret, assess, and simplify it.

Preferred uses of chatbots for news also vary from country to country. For example, in Taiwan and South Korea, where news consumption is already heavily mediated by platforms and aggregators, getting the latest news is the most commonly cited use. In Canada and the U.K., summarization ranks highest, while in Austria, Germany, and Japan, users are more likely to say they turn to chatbots to help make sense of complex stories.

Elsewhere, considerations about trust appear to be shaping uses. In Hong Kong and Turkey, where perceptions of press freedom are relatively low, as well as in lower-trust markets such as Hungary and Romania, using AI to evaluate news sources is among the most frequently reported uses. These differences highlight that, much like news consumption itself, the role AI chatbots play depends heavily on the information environments in which they are used.

The emerging uses of AI chatbots point to both challenges and opportunities for publishers. Some of the popular applications highlight audience needs that journalism is well placed to serve. But part of the appeal of chatbots lies in their ability to provide personalized, low-effort responses at scale, a capability that individual publishers may struggle to match. As AI becomes more embedded in people’s habits, as well as within search and other platforms, the path forward may be less about replicating chatbot features and more about reinforcing what makes journalism distinctive and valuable in an increasingly platform-driven information environment.

For now, AI chatbots remain a secondary source of news for most users, with only 1% globally naming them as their primary source of news. But growth has been rapid, particularly among younger people, suggesting that their influence on news consumption is likely to continue expanding, even if that growth looks different across markets.