AI Information Map Romania Released: What Sources AI Systems Pick When They Answer You
The Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) has published the first country results from its AI Information Map, a research project that tracks which media sources artificial intelligence systems make visible, recommend, or flag when people ask them about news and public affairs.
The Romania batch tested ten major AI systems (including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Mistral’s Le Chat and Google AI Overviews) in their free versions, asking comparable questions in both English and Romanian. The findings map the sources behind roughly 360,000 archived answers.
The headline finding is reassuring on one level: no single outlet dominates. The most-cited source, the European Commission, accounts for only about 4% of all citations, and nearly three-quarters of visibility is spread across hundreds of different outlets. By the standards of search and recommendation systems, that is a genuinely diverse base.
But the patterns beneath the surface raise sharper questions for media pluralism. The sources AI systems reach for lean toward international institutions and English-language explainers (the European Commission, the OECD, Reuters, Wikipedia) ahead of Romania’s own newsrooms. Language deepens the divide: asked in English, the systems surface international institutions first; asked the same questions in Romanian, they pull in domestic outlets such as Digi24, Libertatea and HotNews. The same AI, in effect, shows two different countries depending on the language of the question.
The study also examined which sources the systems recommend as reliable and which they flag as manipulation or disinformation. Encouragingly, the recommended set leans toward independent and investigative Romanian journalism. More troubling, when systems labelled a source unreliable or manipulative, they cited evidence only some of the time, and disinformation flags carried a supporting source in just 17% of cases, leaving users unable to check the most serious claims.
The Romania results are published as a browsable set of findings, alongside a full methodology and a profile of Romania Insider, a small English-language outlet that proved unexpectedly central to how AI systems describe the country.
The AI Information Map is designed as a growing database. Romania is the first of ten countries in the first phase, with more to follow. This is ongoing research, and the figures will be updated periodically as new collection rounds are added.
See the full results on the AI Information Map: Romania.
See the AI Information Map project page here.
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