Reuters Institute Digital News Report

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is an annual research publication produced by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Published each June since 2012, the report tracks news audience attitudes across more than 40 countries through a large-scale online survey conducted by YouGov with approximately 100,000 respondents. Its headline measures include news trust, willingness to pay for online news, platform and social-media usage, and increasingly, AI and chatbot engagement with news content.

The 2026 edition, published on 16 June 2026, documented a significant shift in how audiences engage with AI-generated or AI-mediated news. Weekly AI chatbot use for news reached 10% globally (up from 7% in 2025), but trust in AI chatbot news answers stood at just 20% worldwide and 6% in the UK, the lowest of any country surveyed. Overall news trust fell to 37%, its lowest since 2015. Despite the low trust figures, 42% of chatbot news users clicked through to original source articles, suggesting some residual value in the AI-to-publisher referral chain. AI chatbot news use doubled in Greece, South Korea, and Spain while remaining flat in the US, UK, France, and Germany.

The report functions as an annual benchmark for editorial, commercial, and regulatory discussions about the future of journalism. Its trust and AI-use metrics are cited by news publishers in regulatory submissions, by platform companies in content-licensing negotiations, and by academics and policymakers studying structural changes to the news ecosystem. The 2026 findings on AI trust divergence between high-use and low-trust markets will inform ongoing debates about whether AI news aggregation undermines or extends the reach of professional journalism.