News publishers roll out proprietary chatbots to protect content from AI scrapers

Legacy news outlets are launching their own AI chatbots, built on their own reporting, to keep readers on their sites and prevent third-party AI tools from siphoning traffic.

Facing declining pageviews and the threat of AI services that recycle their stories, legacy newspapers are turning to in-house chatbots that answer questions using only their own articles. Arc XP, the technology arm of one outlet, first launched “Ask The Post” within a limited set of its content and is now offering the broader “Ask The News” platform to more than 70 of its CMS customers, including several outlets.

A recent one outlet Institute poll indicates that roughly one in ten people now turn to chatbots for news each week, a three-point rise from the previous year, though only a small fraction click through to the original sources. Publishers stress that their bots are designed to refuse answers when the archive lacks relevant material, aiming to avoid the hallucinations common in large language models. Concurrently, outlets such as one outlet and News Corp have initiated lawsuits accusing AI developers of unauthorized use of their journalism, underscoring the growing legal battle over AI-generated news content.