A new global survey shows that one in ten people now turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini for news at least once a week. That is up three percentage points from last year, according to the 2026 Digital News Report.
The same report found that social and video networks overtook news publishers as a global news source for the first time this year.
AI chatbots are now emerging as the next platform to watch in how people consume news.
Growth Is Not Evenly Spread
The rise in chatbot news use is not happening everywhere at the same pace. Weekly use doubled in South Korea, rising from 7% to 14%. Peru went from 6% to 11%. Spain moved from 4% to 8%.
In the US, usage held steady at 6%. The UK sat at 4%, Germany at 5%, and Denmark at 5%. Northern and Western European markets showed little movement year on year.
Countries where people already rely heavily on platforms, search engines, and aggregators for news tend to show the highest chatbot adoption. Researchers say this suggests chatbot use is building on habits that already exist.
Trust also plays a role. Markets where people trust AI chatbots more tend to show higher usage. That relationship is stronger for AI than it is for social media, likely because using a chatbot requires an active choice rather than stumbling across news by accident.
Who Is Using Chatbots for News
Age is one of the clearest dividing lines. Seventeen percent of people aged 18 to 24 use AI chatbots for news each week. That drops to just 5% among those aged 55 and over.
Growth over the past year came mostly from adults aged 25 to 54, suggesting adoption is moving beyond early adopters into a broader audience.
Heavy news consumers are also more likely to use chatbots. Among the most intensive news readers, 18% use chatbots for news weekly, compared to 7% among those who only check news once a day.
How People Are Using Them
The most common use, cited by 42% of chatbot news users across 45 markets, is asking a follow-up question about a story. Around 35% use chatbots to get the latest news. About 34% use them to summarize stories, and 33% use them to evaluate whether a source is trustworthy.
Three in ten use chatbots to make complex stories easier to understand.
Preferred uses vary by country. In Taiwan and South Korea, getting the latest news ranks highest. In Canada and the UK, summarization is the top use. In Germany, Austria, and Japan, users most often turn to chatbots to make sense of complicated stories.
In markets with lower press freedom perceptions, such as Hong Kong, Turkey, Hungary, and Romania, using AI to evaluate news sources is among the most common reported uses.
Only 20% of all people surveyed said they trust AI chatbot news outputs most of the time. Among people who actually use chatbots for news, that figure rises to 44%.
Despite the growth, AI chatbots remain a secondary source for most. Just 1% of people globally name them as their primary news source.
