The leader and one of the authors of the Portuguese study “Impact of Generative AI on access to newspapers,” Pedro Pais, tells Lusa that the news summarisation feature may be impacting access to newspapers.

This is one of the conclusions of the study that the Lisbon-based OberCom, a research centre focused on the analysis of contemporary communication dynamics, has just published – “Impact of Generative AI [artificial intelligence] on access to newspapers: Trends and analysis of news searches in Portugal” – with the researcher considering that media companies should create strategies and monitor the impact of summarisation.

This report “arose somewhat from the idea of how we could help newspapers, namely by trying to understand the impact of generative artificial intelligence [AI] specifically on access to newspapers,” explains the researcher.

“What we have found is that more and more people are asking for news summaries, or even if they are not asking, they are receiving news summaries” and “that this will eventually have an impact on access to newspapers,” he points out.

“I would say that one of the first conclusions is that – although there are no scientific articles to prove it yet, in the sense that it is a very recent phenomenon – there does seem to be an increasing impact of generative artificial intelligence on access to newspapers,” he says.

In other words, “more and more people are receiving this type of summary and what happens is that, instead of going to newspapers to explore the news, explore other types of news, they receive this summary and there is, probably a certain news sufficiency that makes them either click on news links to then see the news in more detail or not even go to newspaper websites,” points out Pedro Pais.

With regard to the AI we deal with, there is ChatGPT or Gemini, which are “platforms we use” voluntarily and where you can ask for news, “which is what we did: what are the main news stories of the day? Or, specifically on the subject of the Lisbon funicular crash in September, what news stories are there on this subject,” he reports.

However, there are other platforms such as Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode, which “are less voluntary,” emphasises the study’s co-author.

AI Overview “is unique because we put something into a Google search engine, which is something (…) traditional (…) and we get a summary by artificial intelligence, in other words, it’s something involuntary” and “I can’t disable it, I can’t do anything and I receive news about it”, already summarised, “which may satisfy me and, therefore, I won’t access newspapers or newspaper websites because of that”.

AI Mode, on the other hand, “is a kind of middle ground between this AI Overview, which is completely involuntary, and other platforms, such as ChatGPT”.

This is a “new phenomenon” in the sense that this more involuntary type of AI “can have an even greater impact on this lack of access to newspapers, and this is essentially what companies, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States, have been complaining about.”

In other words, “this type of involuntary artificial intelligence, which is part of our day-to-day, which we can no longer really distinguish from the normal almost, and which is impacting newspapers”.

The final conclusion concerns companies and what can be done: “the most practical conclusion would be to monitor, as far as possible, the type of impact this may or may not be having”.

In other words, “monitoring the people who access newspapers, what has happened, for example, in the last year, particularly since the emergence of AI Overview”, trying to understand what is going on “and then also having strategies in place accordingly”.

Strategies that may involve the adoption of a kind of slow journalism, which is not only more in-depth reporting, but also a greater connection to the reader/user themselves, with more detailed news.

“In short, there is a whole range of possible strategies, even at community level, a more direct connection, for example, through WhatsApp, on the part of companies, a way of trying, either through writing or through a more direct relationship with the reader (…) to render that AI summary useless”, making the reader “want to see the news for the news itself”, he concludes.

The aim of the analysis was to explore, within the Portuguese context, how the top news stories of a given day are presented in three different sites: ChatGPT, Gemini and the Google search engine, the report says.

Data collection was carried out on 10 September 2025. In total, 10 users with separate accounts participated in the research, and 78 searches were carried out.