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”.

Reform UK appeared in 88% of Google AI Overviews; Keir Starmer appeared in 11% of ChatGPT’s responses. The visibility of Reform UK increased across queries about immigration and council tax. Labour was more visible in responses to queries about the NHS.

LLMs are becoming a new battleground for political messaging, with wide-ranging consequences for how political parties succeed or fail. Across the UK, more and more people are turning to AI models for information.

“What we’re tending to find is that, compared to maybe about even a year ago, if you had asked … a question related to politics, they would basically just politely decline to respond, because they would say, this is not something that I can provide information on,” said Sam Stockwell, a senior researcher at the Alan Turing Institute, which specialises in data science and AI.