The MHP Polarisation Tracker* found that 13% of the British public said they talk to AI chatbots to form their political opinions,17% said they use AI to factcheck news stories and 23% believe AI provides a more accurate picture of political issues than the BBC.
Our Maiven GEO team analysed how AI platforms ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude answer questions about local politics – and the sources of information informing these answers.
LLMs’ answers are contextual, so Maiven ran a study of 100 example questions, analysing the answers given between April 21st-27th, two weeks ahead of election day.
The example questions were based on a basket of priority issues at this year’s local elections identified by YouGov, ranging from roads and bins to crime and the cost of living. We confined our questions to the five biggest parties.
There are five key takeaways from the data:
1.Labour is the most prominent party
Labour appears in 21% of answers, compared with 15% for Greens, 14% for Reform, 10% for the Conservatives and 7% for the LibDems.
Beyond the parties, Ipsos was the most-referenced polling company and the Institute for Government was the most-referenced think tank.
The Green Party and Reform in particular have much less of a track record in local government to examine, so their relative prominence in the answers is notable.
2.LLMs favour official sources, particularly Gov.uk
The Government portal drew 2,641 citations across the 100 answers given. The Guardian comes second, with 953 and the official UK Parliament website third, with 912.
ChatGPT is particularly keen on Gov.uk as a source, citing it about six times as frequently as Gemini or Claude.
3.Hannah White is the most-cited journalist
The co-host of ‘The Expert Factor’ podcast and Director of the Institute for Government, has 102 citations across the 100 answers, compared with 51 for the Guardian’s Peter Walker and 43 for PoliticsHome author Sam Freedman.
LibDem peer, polling expert and blogger Mark Pack was the fifth-most cited ‘journalist’ source.
4.AI is encouraging people to view parties’ published manifestos
The most-cited manifesto was from the Conservatives (33 citations), followed by the LibDems (25) and Labour (20).
5.Earned media sources consistently accounted for approximately 80% of all citations
This was a consistent pattern across the seven days of the study, underlining the key role that journalism plays in shaping how these platforms see – and explain – evolving issues like politics.
Journalism does ‘live’ brilliantly, while official sources tend to lag. The LLMs were careful to avoid editorialising in their answers and the sentiment scores for answers were almost entirely neutral, but the citations in the answers to our questions lean centre-left.
To learn more about Maiven GEO click here.
*Gen pop survey of 1,000 British adults, conducted February 2026.
