Research institute · Pew Research Center
Pew 2026: 36% turn to news brands first for breaking news
Just 36% of US adults now turn first to their preferred news organisation when something breaks, down from 54% in 2018. Search engines (28%) and social media (19%) have absorbed most of that traffic, and the shift is sharpest among under-30s.
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Key findings at a glance
- 36% of US adults say they turn first to their preferred news organisation when they want more information about a breaking news event.
- 28% say they go to a search engine like Google or Bing first when breaking news happens, up from 15% in 2018.
- 19% open social media first when a breaking news event hits, more than double the 9% who did so in 2018.
- 5% ask friends, family or acquaintances first when breaking news happens, broadly unchanged from 2018.
- 1% say they go to an AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini first for more information about breaking news.
- 54% of Americans turned to their preferred news organisation first in 2018, an 18-point fall in seven years, the biggest single shift in the dataset.
- 41% of 18- to 29-year-olds turn to a search engine first when breaking news happens, the most common first move for that age group.
- 31% of 18- to 29-year-olds turn to social media first when breaking news happens, versus 6% of those aged 65 and over.
- 59% of US adults aged 65 and over still turn to their preferred news organisation first, around four times the rate among 18- to 29-year-olds.
- 14% of 18- to 29-year-olds turn to a preferred news organisation first, the lowest first-touch share for traditional news brands across any age band.
- 76% of US adults aged 18 to 29 say they get news from social media at least sometimes, against 28% of those aged 65 and over (cited in the same Pew analysis).
- 3,560 US adults surveyed by Pew Research Center between 8 and 14 December 2025 as part of the Pew-Knight Initiative.
What the report covers
Pew Research Center's Pew-Knight Initiative re-ran a question the Center first fielded in 2018: when a breaking news event happens, where do you typically turn first to get more information? In December 2025 it surveyed 3,560 US adults online through the Center's American Trends Panel.
The headline figure, 36% turn first to their preferred news organisation, is an 18-point fall from the 54% who said the same in 2018. Search engines and social media have each absorbed roughly half of that lost share: search-engine first-touch rose from 15% to 28%, social-media first-touch from 9% to 19%. A new 2025 option, AI chatbots, captured 1%, small, but a measurable share carved out of established channels inside a single survey cycle.
The most useful layer in the data is the age breakdown. Pew published a four-band cut (18-29, 30-49, 50-64, 65+) and the curve runs in one direction: the older the respondent, the more likely they are to go to a news brand first. 59% of over-65s turn first to a preferred news organisation; 14% of under-30s do. That gap is the single most actionable cell in the table for anyone planning content distribution.
What this means for UK marketers
Pew's data is US, but the underlying mechanic, younger audiences search and scroll for news, older audiences open a news brand they already trust, shows up in UK consumption surveys too. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 UK chapter tracks the same trendline in British audiences. The practical reads for UK marketers split three ways.
Top-of-funnel news content should be search-led and built for snippets. If 28% of adults, and 41% of under-30s, turn to a search engine first when something happens in their sector, the brands picking up that traffic are the ones with a recent, structured, fact-dense page that Google can lift into a featured snippet or AI Overview. For most UK ecommerce and B2B sites, that means treating reactive news commentary as an SEO output, not a press output, a short page published within hours of a news beat, with clear headings, a quotable number, a sourced primary statistic and schema markup. The window from breaking event to indexed-and-ranked is the asset, not the article itself.
Social distribution should follow the age cohort, not the brand calendar. 31% of under-30s open social media first when news breaks. 6% of over-65s do. If an audience skews under 35, anything DTC, lifestyle, fintech, gaming, Gen-Z fashion, news-adjacent content needs to be drafted for vertical video, carousel and threads before it is drafted for the website. A 1,500-word blog post that takes six hours to publish is a B2B asset for a sales pitch, not a reach asset. The reverse holds for finance, insurance, healthcare and retirement-adjacent categories targeting 55+, where a long-form, branded news page on a trusted site still does the work. Digital marketing strategy that runs the same content across both ends of that age curve underdelivers at both ends.
AI chatbots are small but worth the early position. 1% first-touch is rounding-error today, but the same survey already shows AI chatbots pulling 2% of under-30s and the trajectory only moves one way. The cost of being on the right side of that curve is low, clear factual citations on owned pages, primary data wherever you can publish it, and authorship that holds up to scrutiny. The same hygiene that wins featured snippets today wins AI chatbot citations next year. It also fits the broader generational pattern we've been tracking in adjacent verticals, where under-50 audiences are routing trust away from institutional sources into platform-native ones.
How they got the data
Pew Research Center surveyed 3,560 US adults online between 8 and 14 December 2025. All respondents are members of the Center's American Trends Panel, recruited via address-based sampling to be nationally representative of the US adult population. The 2026 short read was published by the Pew-Knight Initiative, the Center's joint research programme with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Comparisons against the 2018 wave should be made with caution. Four response options appeared in both surveys (preferred news organisation; search engines; social media; friends, family or acquaintances), but the 2025 wave added "AI chatbots," "Some other source" and "I don't look for more information," and dropped "News aggregating website or apps", which sat at single-digit shares in 2018. Pew published the full topline, question wording and methodology document alongside the short read.
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From Pew Research Center · published 24/03/2026