AI will reach the milestone of one million media content items in 2025

Since November 2022 and the launch of ChatGPT, media coverage of AI has been breaking records. In 2025, and for the first time since the Observatory's creation, the "AI topic" surpassed one million pieces of content in a single year. This volume is equivalent to the major topics most covered by the press in France, such as the coverage of the war in Ukraine or that of… Donald Trump.

Discover the groundbreaking study

But, beyond the 2025 volume:

• How has the media visibility of AI evolved in recent years?
• What events marked 2025?
• Who are the main players?
• Which AI-related topics are capturing media attention?

Reaching the million-content mark: unprecedented media exposure

With 1.002.299 media pieces of content projected for 2025, representing a 48% increase compared to 2024, artificial intelligence has now established itself as one of the most frequently covered topics in French media. Since 2022, more than 2,5 million pieces of content have been identified, a 443% increase in three years.

This “media explosion” can be explained by the convergence of several factors. First, AI quickly moved beyond the purely technological sphere to permeate all sectors of the economy and society: employment, healthcare, education, defense, finance… and, mirroring this, a similar movement amplified in all the relevant sections of the French press, and more broadly, in national, regional, and local mainstream media. Second, geopolitical competition between the United States, China, and Europe transformed AI into a matter of national power and sovereignty, generating a continuous stream of announcements, investment plans, and debates. The increasing number of anxiety-inducing announcements in many companies, including in the press, also fuels the fear of a “great replacement” in the workplace and contributes to the phenomenon. The same is true for news and statements from leading figures in the sector, as well as the frenetic pace of new model releases.

So much so that it sometimes becomes difficult to interpret peaks in visibility or to attribute them to a specific news item, as the subject generates significant volumes of articles on diverse themes.

However, among the notable peaks of 2025, we can identify the launch of Donald Trump's Stargate plan (January), the AI ​​Action Summit held in Paris (February), Nvidia's record performance propelled by the advent of AI agents, Amazon's announcements eliminating 14.000 jobs (October), and finally the launch of Prometheus by Jeff Bezos combined with Yann LeCun's departure from Meta to found AMI Labs (November).

All these events have kept AI-related news flowing daily throughout the year. In total, more than 2.700 related articles were published daily in the French press in 2025. This pace doesn't seem to be slowing down: the first quarter of 2026 has already seen 300.846 articles, or more than 3.300 per day, driven in particular by the opening in April of the trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

ChatGPT is in the lead but facing increasing competition.

While ChatGPT remains the most publicized AI, its dominance is gradually eroding.

In 2023, at the time of the launch of the Observatory's first edition, OpenAI's solution accounted for 83% of media mentions of leading AIs. By 2025, this share had fallen to 48%, and to 41% in Q1 2026, due to increased competition, notably from Gemini (Google, 17% share of voice in 2025 and 23% in Q1 2026), Claude (Anthropic, 11% in 2025 and 18% in Q1 2026) and Mistral (Mistral AI, 12% in 2025 and 8% in Q1 2026).

DeepSeek, the Chinese model launched in early 2025, shook up the landscape by concentrating 6% of voice shares at the time of its launch, before falling back to 2% at the beginning of 2026.

Perplexity (Perplexity AI), for its part, is struggling to emerge in the media in the face of the competition, with only 3% share of voice in 2025 and 2% in the first quarter of 2026.

Elon Musk will dominate the AI ​​CEO rankings by 2025

Paradoxically, while Grok, integrated into X, accounted for only 3% of total media content from major AIs in 2025, its creator Elon Musk largely dominates the ranking of executives most associated with these technologies in the media with 22.766 mentions last year, or 47% of the total.

Far behind, Sam Altman (OpenAI) ranks second with 10.086 pieces of content (21%), followed by Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) with 6.416 pieces of content (13%).

The hyper-visibility of the world's richest man is due less to Grok's performance than to the multiplication of his statements and the controversies in which he is involved on the subject.

Sam Altman, despite being the head of OpenAI, the company that sparked the ChatGPT revolution, comes in second with less than half the media coverage of Musk.

Further down the rankings, Jensen Huang (Nvidia) has 3.938 pieces of content, Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI) 2.438 pieces of content, YannLe Cun (AMI Labs) 1.005 pieces of content, Dario Amodei (Anthropic) 910 pieces of content, Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek) 473 pieces of content and Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity AI) 273 pieces of content.

Media, employment, environment: the top 3 themes associated with AI

In 2025, the themes most often associated with AI in the French press reveal the major societal tensions of the moment and paint a picture of a technology that has definitively left the "Tech" pages to settle at the heart of the public debate.

The "media" theme is by far the most popular (348.000 pieces of content), reflecting the questions in newsrooms, followed by employment (286.000 pieces of content), illustrating fears related to job cuts and skills transformation, and the environment (256.000 pieces of content), reflecting the growing debates on the carbon footprint of AI models.

Next come finance (237.000), intellectual property (227.000), education (221.000), defense (175.000), commerce (168.000), medicine (157.000) and politics (126.000).

What this changes for construction industry players

For manufacturers, software publishers, and construction professionals, this evolution confirms the importance of producing structured, reliable, and accessible content. As ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity become entry points to technical information, a company's visibility increasingly depends on its ability to be understood, contextualized, and cited by these AI tools. This represents a new dimension of digital communication, now central to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies.

Methodology : The study was conducted based on the analysis of more than 5.500 news programs (broadcast by 410 TV/radio channels and stations for an average of 2.400 hours per day) and a selection of 3.000 print publications (paper titles and editorial websites). Articles appearing in multiple editions of regional print publications are counted only once.

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.