AI chatbots may be better than search engines in guarding against foreign propaganda

NPR and NewsGuard developed queries for AI chatbots and search engines using false narratives spread by China, Iran and Russia and compared their performances. Getty Images/Photo illustration by Emily Bogle/NPR hide caption

Since AI chatbots exploded in popularity and Google started offering AI-generated answers, people who research foreign influence campaigns have expressed concern that some governments may poison AI-generated answers with false narratives. But an experiment NPR conducted with NewsGuard, a company that monitors online falsehoods and issues ratings about the reliability of online news sources, found that popular AI chatbots mostly pushed back against false narratives spread by foreign states. AI summaries that are increasingly found at the top of search engine results didn't perform as well. But overall, they still pushed back against state-spread falsehoods a majority of the time.

NPR also looked at how often AI-generated answers may have uncritically exposed users to false information compared to traditional search results.

The experiment found that AI chatbots outperformed search engines, while AI summaries underperformed. The results suggest that compared with traditional web search links, using AI chatbots with web search access is a "good way for users to start to investigate these issues," said Mike Caulfield, a digital literacy expert at the University of Washington, Bothell, who has tested AI tools for search extensively. NPR's experiment revealed that AI summaries at the top of search engine results may warrant more caution, depending on the product.

Even before the popularization of generative AI, networks of pro-Kremlin outlets churned out content promoting the Russian government's worldview. The volume of articles has increased for at least one such site as propagandists use generative AI to make even more content.

NPR and NewsGuard researchers Isis Blachez and Ines Chomnalez developed 30 questions based on false narratives pushed by China, Iran and Russia that first appeared from December 2025 to July 2026.

The questions were then posed to popular AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, along with the largest search engines. (For a full list of tools tested, please see the methodology section at the bottom of the story.)

Once the responses and citations were collected, NPR reviewed and analyzed the data using fact-check documents provided by NewsGuard.