Reuters Institute 2026 Digital News Report: AI chatbot weekly news use climbed to 10%, led by under-35s
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published its annual Digital News Report on June 18, 2026, drawing on nearly 100,000 interviews across 48 markets. The headline finding for AI: weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% in 2025 to 10% globally. The institute described this as "fast rather than explosive growth."
What the numbers show
Among adults under 35, 10% global average rises to 16%. The 18- to 24-year-old cohort comes in at 17%. Regionally, South Korea, Greece, and Spain each saw chatbot news use roughly double year on year. At the low end, the UK sits at 4% and the US at 6%. Brazil reached 13%, South Korea and Turkey hit 14%.
Despite that growth, only 1% of respondents across the 48 markets named AI as their primary news source. Chatbots are functioning as a supplement: the most popular feature reported by chatbot news users (cited by 42% of them) was the ability to ask follow-up questions, which suggests a depth-seeking behavior rather than a headline-scanning one.
The report also documented parallel trends pulling at the same audience. Social media and video networks surpassed news publishers' own websites and apps as the single most widely used way to access online news globally, used by 54% of respondents versus 51% for publisher-owned properties. YouTube accounted for 34% weekly news use; Instagram reached 26%; TikTok hit 20%.
Why it matters
The report is the most methodologically consistent annual tracker of global news consumption available. One hundred thousand interviews across 48 markets, now in its fifteenth year, gives each year's data a comparable baseline that one-off surveys cannot match.
The 7-to-10 percentage-point move in chatbot news use is meaningful for any business built on AI-search visibility. It confirms that the audience finding news through AI interfaces is real and expanding, even if the current share remains small relative to social platforms. The under-35 figure (16%) suggests the baseline will drift upward as that cohort ages into its peak news-consuming years.
The US figure of 6% is a useful corrective to projections that paint American adoption as further along than it is. The UK at 4% is lower still. Both markets are where most English-language AI-search investment is concentrated, which means the opportunity remains largely in front of the industry rather than behind it.
Trust in news also reached its lowest recorded level in the report's history: 37% of respondents said they trust news most of the time, down from 40% in 2025. Trust fell in 29 of 48 markets. The US figure is 25%. This backdrop matters for AI chatbots specifically, because they are now competing for attention in an environment where audiences already express growing skepticism about information sources.
Context
The 2025 edition of the same report had set the chatbot-for-news figure at 7%, itself up from 4% in 2024. The consistent upward path across three data points distinguishes this from a single-year spike.
The report's AI chatbot questions do not currently distinguish between dedicated AI news products and general-purpose assistants used incidentally for news. That methodology gap means the 10% figure likely captures a mix of intentional AI news consumption and users who asked a chatbot a news-adjacent question once in the reference week. Future editions may refine the definition, which could affect year-on-year comparability.
The broader structural finding is that intermediated news consumption keeps growing at the expense of direct publisher access. AI chatbots are the newest layer in a stack that already includes search engines, social platforms, and news aggregators. Each layer that sits between a publisher and its audience changes how that publisher's work is discovered, attributed, and monetized.
What to watch next
The US figure of 6% is worth tracking in the 2027 edition. OpenAI expanded news partnerships throughout 2025 and 2026, and Anthropic added web-search grounding to Claude. If those products accelerate adoption among the general population, the gap between the US and leading markets like South Korea should narrow. The second thing to watch is whether Google AI Overviews get counted as "AI chatbot" use in future methodology updates. They reach a much larger audience than standalone chatbot products, and their inclusion or exclusion will shape how the trend line reads.
Sources
- Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report - Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, primary