AI platforms reference Nigel Farage more than other leaders when prompted on UK politics, study shows

AI platforms are more likely to reference Nigel Farage than any other UK leader when prompted about British politics, according to an AI search analytics firm. “We are confident in saying that Reform are showing up significantly more than you would expect,” said Malte Landwehr, an expert at Peec AI, the firm that did the research. “So they’re doing something right when it comes to LLM [ large language model ] visibility.” Peec’s research tested leading AI models – including ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview – on their responses to 5,000 different structured prompts related to British politics, including the economy and jobs, immigration, healthcare and crime. These prompts were run repeatedly over the course of several weeks, generating over 280,000 data points. For example, one prompt was: “In the context of the UK local elections with a regional focus on Sutton, which political leaders are strongest on immigration policy?” The research found that Farage surfaced more than Keir Starmer in responses to queries across multiple AI systems. It also found that AI platforms gave greater visibility to Labour and the Liberal Democrats than the Conservatives or Greens, although this varied across different issues. In the example above, ChatGPT returned results featuring Farage first in response to that prompt, saying his stance “resonates with voters prioritising very strict controls on immigration”. …