The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the Oxford research centre behind the annual Digital News Report (DNR), published its 2026 edition on Tuesday 16 June.1 It put weekly use of AI chatbots for news at 10% globally, up from 7% a year earlier. Trust in the answers those chatbots give sits at 20% worldwide, and at just 6% in the UK, the lowest of any country surveyed.
That means barely one UK reader in seventeen trusts what an AI news answer tells them. Overall trust in news fell to 37%, the lowest the survey has recorded since 2015. Among surveyed chatbot news users, 42% said they always or often clicked through to original sources. This measures reported frequency, not observed referral traffic. Usage doubled in Greece, South Korea and Spain over the year while staying flat across the US, UK, France and Germany.
A paradox now sits under every licensing deal: readers reach for AI news faster than they trust it, and publishers, nearly all of whom already use AI, are selling into an audience that disbelieves the output. That gap is why UK publishers spent June building legal walls, the Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) opt-out order against Google and the £500-per-article crawler charges launched by 31 sites.
