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The growing popularity of AI chatbots is reshaping how audiences discover news, with one in 10 people worldwide now using tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews for news at least weekly, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s Digital News Report 2026.
On July 13, Arc XP, a media operating system developed by the Washington Post, launched Ask The News, an AI-powered conversational search tool that publishers can embed on their own sites. Users can ask questions of Ask The News, which answers using the publisher’s reporting with attribution and editorial safeguards. The tool will decline to answer questions when it does not have enough source reporting to generate a confident response, Arc XP says, rather than hallucinate an answer.
Arc XP’s Subscription Gateway, a capability embedded into Ask The News, changes the traditional paywall model by limiting AI-generated answers rather than articles, prompting readers to subscribe after they have received value from the tool.
For newsrooms, the tool could offer a new way to understand audience demand. Instead of relying on clicks and page views, Ask The News allows publishers to see what questions readers have and subsequently use those insights to guide coverage decisions.
“Search shows links. Generic AI gives answers from the open web,” said Joey Marburger, Vice President of Content Intelligence, Arc XP. “Ask The News answers with a publisher’s journalism, rules, and business model. This is about building a durable reader habit: when you have a question, you go to your trusted news organization first.”
As AI-generated answers become an increasingly common way for people to access information, publishers may be forced to rethink how their reporting reaches audiences through emerging AI experiences in addition to through traditional means.
Ask The News is now available to Arc XP publisher partners with a JavaScript embed option for non-Arc XP publishers. Arc XP plans to expand the tool with features including personalized briefings, saved conversations, topic tracking and editorial intelligence dashboards.
