Pedro Pais, one of the leaders and authors of the Portuguese study “The Impact of Generative AI on Access to Newspapers”, told Lusa that the news summarization feature could be impacting access to newspapers.
This is one of the conclusions of a study published by OberCom, a Lisbon-based research center focused on the analysis of modern communication dynamics. “Impact of generative AI” [artificial intelligence] “On Access to Newspapers: Trends and Analysis of News Search in Portugal” – Researchers believe that media companies need to strategize and monitor the impact of their summaries.
The report was “born out of an idea of how we can help newspapers – trying to understand the impact of generative artificial intelligence.” [AI] especially regarding access to newspapers,” the researchers explain.
“What we're finding is that more and more people are asking for news summaries, or are receiving news summaries even when they don't ask for them,” he notes, “and that this will ultimately impact access to newspapers.”
“One of the first conclusions is that, in terms of a very recent phenomenon, the influence of generative artificial intelligence on access to newspapers appears to be increasing, although there are no scientific papers to prove it yet,” he says.
In other words, “What is happening is that more and more people are receiving this kind of summary, and instead of going to the newspaper to look up the news or looking up other types of news, just receiving this summary is enough for them to have some news, perhaps to the point where they don't click on the news link to find out more or even go to the newspaper's website,” Pedro Pais points out.
In terms of AI we work with, we have ChatGPT or Gemini. These are “platforms we use voluntarily” where you can ask for news. “What did we do, what was the main news of the day? Or what was the news on this subject, especially regarding the cable car accident in Lisbon in September,” he reports.
But there are also platforms, such as Google's AI Overview and AI Mode, that are “less spontaneous,” stress the study's co-authors.
The introduction to AI is unique in that “you type something into the Google search engine. It's (…) traditional (…) and artificial intelligence gives you a summary. In other words, it's involuntary,” and “You can't disable it, you can't do anything about it, but you get news about it,” and “I don't go to newspapers or newspaper websites for that, because I might be satisfied with this.”
AI mode, on the other hand, is “a kind of middle ground between this AI overview, which is completely involuntary, and other platforms like ChatGPT.”
This is a “new phenomenon” in the sense that more involuntary types of AI “could have an even greater impact on the lack of access to newspapers, which is essentially what businesses in the UK and US in particular are complaining about”.
In other words, “this type of involuntary artificial intelligence is so much a part of our daily life that it is no longer nearly distinguishable from regular artificial intelligence, and it is influencing newspapers.”
The final conclusion is about what can be done with businesses: “The most practical conclusion would be to monitor as much as possible the kinds of impacts this will have.”
In other words, it's about “monitoring people accessing newspapers and what's happened over the past year, for example, and especially since the advent of AI Overview,” trying to understand what's going on and “strategizing accordingly.”
A strategy that involves introducing a kind of slow journalism. This not only provides more in-depth coverage but also strengthens the connection with readers/users themselves with more in-depth news.
“In short, even at the community level, there are a wide variety of possible strategies, such as how companies can create more direct connections via WhatsApp, through texts, or through more direct relationships with readers (…) to try to make AI summaries useless,” he concludes, “so that readers want to see the news itself.”
The aim of the analysis was to examine how the top news stories of a given day are displayed in the Portuguese context on three different sites: ChatGPT, Gemini and the Google search engine, the report said.
Data collection was performed on September 10, 2025. A total of 10 users with separate accounts participated in the study and 78 searches were performed.
