AI systems cite news outlets up to 2.08 times more concentrated than their traffic, and owner-level concentration measures run 1.30 times higher than outlet-level ones
AspireAI community · arXiv
The paper compiles an ownership dataset for 9,761 digital news outlets from Wikipedia and Wikidata, with high agreement against independently compiled US and UK news directories, and derives traffic-weighted concentration indices for 77 countries. Owner-level indices run a median 1.30 times higher than outlet-level ones, and journalists report more owner pressure in more concentrated countries at rho = +0.318. Applying the same measures to AI-mediated discovery, citation distributions from seven AI systems were 1.23 to 2.08 times more concentrated than traffic at the outlet level and 1.11 to 1.79 times more concentrated at the owner level, with Ahrefs showing the largest gap at 2.08 times. The authors also find AI systems preferentially cite state-controlled outlets when prompted in a country's native language, though on the Ahrefs panel they read that null as a size effect and note it is underpowered. The dataset and code are released for monitoring.
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