Political groups on both sides pay for websites that look like local news, then pay to promote their articles. When voters ask chatbots about the same candidates, the bots cite those sites without naming who is behind them. In a NewsGuard audit published September 25, 2026, the sites appeared in 48.2% of election-related answers; just one of 168 answers identified a cited site as partisan.
The groups buy the sites and the social-media ads. A chatbot can then put their material in front of someone who never saw either, presenting it as a source for an ordinary answer.
NewsGuard deputy editor Ines Chomnalez and AI analyst Isis Blachez built prompts around recent articles from 12 partisan sites in six battleground states. They tested seven chatbots on questions about candidates and issues those sites had covered.
NewsGuard calls the sites pink slime: publications that present themselves as independent news while concealing political or ideological funding. The audit found that 7.7% of chatbot answers cited a partisan site as their only source in the answer, although other sources appeared in the lists attached to those responses.
The share of answers citing at least one of the tested sites varied sharply by chatbot:
| Chatbot | Answers citing a partisan site |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 70.8% |
| Copilot; Perplexity | 54.2% each |
| Claude | 50% |
| Gemini | 41.7% |
| Meta AI; Grok | 37.5%; 29.2% |
A separate check found that Google AI Overviews cited the sites in 12 of 24 answers. Across the seven chatbots, left-leaning sites appeared in 36.3% of answers, compared with 11.9% for right-leaning sites. NewsGuard says the left-leaning sites’ more frequent posting may explain that gap rather than political bias in the bots. In NewsGuard’s follow-up, ChatGPT’s split was 58.3% citing left-leaning sites and 12.5% citing right-leaning ones.
Who pays for the apparent news
The Republican-aligned group One Nation, affiliated with the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC, owns sites including PeachStatePost.com and TheNorthCarolinian.org. Its network spent between $450,000 and $596,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads so far in 2026. Those ads received at least 58.6 million views.
On the Democratic side, American Independent Media runs sites including OhioIndependent.com and AlaskaIndependentNews.com. The nonprofit received $23.5 million from a liberal foundation in 2024. Its network and an associated nonprofit spent between $342,700 and $429,850 on Meta ads so far in 2026, generating at least 38.9 million views. Taken together, those two reported minimums amount to 97.5 million ad views.
A third network, Courier Newsroom, runs IowaStartingLine.com and GranitePostNews.com. It is led by former Democratic strategist Tara McGowan; its parent organization has received funding from Reid Hoffman, George Soros and Arabella Advisors. NewsGuard reports that none of the tested sites discloses who is behind it. As of September 2026, the organization counted 1,179 such sites in the United States, against 937 remaining daily newspapers.
The citation drops the owner
The ownership gap is visible in the answers. Asked whether Republican Senate candidate Dan Sullivan voted against lifting tariffs threatening Alaska’s fishing industry, all seven chatbots cited AlaskaIndependentNews.com. NewsGuard says Sullivan did cast the votes.
For Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, Meta AI, Claude, Perplexity and Copilot cited One Nation’s PeachStatePost.com when asked about his tax-cut votes and workers who rely on overtime. NewsGuard then asked Copilot a different Ossoff question, whether he was bad for working-class families, twice. It cited PeachStatePost.com the first time and a left-leaning American Independent network site the second. Neither answer identified the site’s political agenda or cited an independent Georgia local outlet.
That is the arrangement the audit exposes. Competing groups can fund competing answers; a bot can change which one it draws on while leaving the voter equally uninformed about who paid to publish it. NewsGuard also found one exception: Grok described Courier’s GranitePostNews.com as “partisan reporting” when answering a question about New Hampshire Republican candidate John Sununu. Five other bots cited that site for the same question without doing so.
In NewsGuard’s follow-up, Chomnalez and Blachez put the finding plainly:
“Rather than alerting users to the hidden agenda, the bots are amplifying sources without disclosing their biases.”
Microsoft was the one chatbot company that answered NewsGuard. Its spokesperson said Copilot draws on a wide range of publicly available search results and encourages users to review sources for accuracy. The other six chatbot companies, along with One Nation, American Independent Media and Courier Newsroom, did not respond to NewsGuard’s requests for comment.
A source link lets a voter inspect a website. In 167 of NewsGuard’s 168 answers, it did not tell them the political affiliation they needed to assess it.
Further Reading
- ‘Pink Slime’ Is Infecting AI Chatbots Ahead of the Midterms, NewsGuard researchers’ account of the audit, its examples and the operators behind the tested sites.
- AI Chatbots Amplify PAC-Funded News About Midterms, NewsGuard’s follow-up breakdown of the same findings.