TL;DR
Ofcom’s annual study of news habits shows 21% of UK adults used AI apps or services to follow the news during the past month, with ChatGPT alone reaching 13%. Yet 56% say they place less trust in AI-produced stories or summaries than in human journalism. For UK publishers, that combination means audiences are arriving through a channel they are wary of, and one the publisher does not control.
What Ofcom measured
The regulator’s 2026 News Report describes a “dramatic shift” in how people find and consume news, with the move towards AI most pronounced among younger adults and wealthier households.
AI is still some way behind the established intermediaries. Social media and video platforms were used for news by 60% of adults over the same month, and by 78% of both 16 to 24-year-olds and 12 to 15-year-olds. Facebook led at 39%, ahead of YouTube at 33%. Once search engines and aggregators are added, almost three quarters of people (73%) reached the news through some kind of online go-between.
Ofcom also found that much of what people see on those platforms still originates with established broadcasters. On average, adults gave 72 minutes a day to keeping up with news.
Ian Macrae, Ofcom’s director of market intelligence, summed up the change: people increasingly do not seek out the news themselves, because it reaches them through intermediaries that are “increasingly AI-enabled”. He added that audiences remain selective about which sources they trust, especially around elections.
Why the trust figure matters
The 56% figure is not just public caution. BBC-led research in 2025 found AI assistants regularly distorted or misattributed news content when answering questions about current events. People using ChatGPT to catch up on the day are relying on a summary layer that has already been shown to introduce errors, and that often sits between them and the original reporting.
Looking forward
Macrae’s advice to broadcasters and publishers was to keep adapting distribution so they are not “drowned out by the noise”. In practice, that means deciding how content should appear inside AI products, whether through licensing, structured data or blocking crawlers, rather than relying on referral traffic from search and social alone. The report also gives UK public service broadcasters evidence to press for prominence in AI interfaces, as the Media Act 2024 secured for them on connected TV platforms. For businesses that communicate with customers through the media, it is a reminder to check how AI tools summarise their announcements.