AI answer engines bypass local news outlets going straight to official sources
Research shows that popular AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini often leave out local news publishers, even when people ask about local issues such as council decisions and crime.
The research was carried out by AI search experts Searchable. It found that ChatGPT cites national newspapers in 18.8% of its sources for local questions, almost as often as it cites local news outlets, at 21.2%.
ChatGPT also tends to favour information published directly by local councils over news reports about those councils. It turns to council or government websites for 81.3% of questions, but to local news sources for just 0.9%.
For example, among the 20 news sources ChatGPT cites most often when answering local questions, only one is a local news outlet: Wales Online. It ranks 18th, behind several national news outlets, Wikipedia and Facebook.
The research found that up to 10% of prompts about news ask about local issues.
The findings come as Ofcom's latest 2026 News Report revealed that one in five people in the UK now use AI apps to get news. AI use for news is most common among people aged 25 to 34, at 37%.
The Searchable researchers tested five AI assistants using 30,000 prompts. They asked 20 different questions about 100 towns and cities in the UK. The tools were ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Google's AI Mode search and AI Overviews, which appear at the top of Google search results.
The questions covered topics such as finding local news, crime, planning, housing, roads, council decisions, sport and local events.
Across the five AI tools, the researchers found 244,725 citations pointing to 10,000 different websites.
For questions about crime, police websites provided 57.8% of the answers and appeared in 95.9% of them.
The research looked at both well-established local newspapers and smaller news websites that regularly publish local news.
Chris Donnelly, chief executive of Searchable, explained how ChatGPT searches for news. A more detailed explanation is available here.
Donnelly said: “When you ask ChatGPT what is happening in your local town or city, the AI chatbot splits your question into several searches behind the scenes. It then creates an answer using the pages it finds in those searches. Looking at this early stage of the process helps us understand the competition local news websites face in AI systems.”
On average, these searches found information from 12.3 websites, but ChatGPT used information from only four of them in its answer.
Donnelly said: “At the moment, on average, one in seven of these searches points to a local news provider, while one in three targets a council, the police or another official organisation.
“In most ChatGPT answers to questions about local news, a news outlet that regularly covers the story is competing with up to 16 other web pages to be used as a source. This does not include competing news websites.
“Should local publishers be worried? On one hand, figures from Chartbeat, published by the Reuters Institute, show that traffic from Google searches to publishers fell by a third in 2025 as AI-generated answers became more widespread. On the other hand, a report based on Similarweb data found that visits to news websites from AI tools grew by 770% in the year to June 2025. However, that growth was for large global news brands, and Google search still sends far more visits to websites than AI platforms do.
“For a regional news outlet, AI is not yet making up for the search traffic it is losing. This makes building a strong audience in its own local area even more important.”
Donnelly said the findings suggest that focusing on local search questions could help news publishers reach more people.
He said: “If local publishers want their stories to appear more often in AI answers to local questions, they should note how specific ChatGPT's searches can be. It can search for details as precise as a named road or a planning application number. This means local news outlets need to cover more of these specific issues.
“These are also the subjects that Newsquest praised last year for helping to bring its most loyal readers back during a period of strong subscriber growth. For a local news outlet that wants to appear more often in AI-generated answers, covering what is happening in its own area, rather than chasing stories that are trending nationally, seems more important than it was in the days of traditional Google search.”
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