TL;DR

AI assistants answering questions about UK towns and cities often bypass local newspapers, according to a study by Searchable, which specialises in AI search visibility, reported by Press Gazette on 22 October. For local questions, ChatGPT drew on council or government sources 81.3% of the time and on local news sites just 0.9% of the time. Only one local title, Wales Online, made ChatGPT’s top 20 sources for local queries, in 18th place.

What the research did

Searchable put 30,000 prompts to five assistants: Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, plus Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. It asked 20 questions about each of 100 UK towns and cities, on topics from housing, planning and roads to crime, sport, events and what councils had decided. The answers contained 244,725 citations drawn from 10,000 different websites.

On crime questions, police force websites appeared in 95.9% of answers and supplied 57.8% of them. By Searchable’s estimate, as much as 10% of news prompting concerns local matters.

Why it happens

Searchable chief executive Chris Donnelly said ChatGPT splits a local question into several behind-the-scenes searches and builds its reply from what comes back. On average those searches surfaced 12.3 websites, of which four were used. “One in three is aimed at the council, the police or another official body,” he said, against roughly one in seven leading to local journalism.

His advice to publishers is to cover the granular issues the assistants search for, which can narrow to a single street or a planning application number, rather than chasing national trends.

Context

The findings land as publishers fight on several fronts over AI’s use of their work, including the complaint to UK and EU regulators over Meta’s new terms this week. Press Gazette also points to Ofcom’s 2026 News Report, which found AI apps are now a source of news for one person in five across the UK.

Looking forward

This is research from an AI search visibility specialist with an interest in the problem it describes, so the exact percentages should be read with that in mind. The direction is still worth noting. In our view, if AI assistants go straight to councils and police for local facts, local titles lose the referral traffic without anyone asking whether the official account is the whole story, which is the scrutiny local journalism exists to provide.