Search sources

Policy Genome | Narrative Monitor | Counted 6 October 2026 from the public evidence pages

The result

Ten audits had web search on. We compared each Russian answer with the English answer of the same model in the same answer round. Only the language of the question was different.

	Russian	English
Answers whose saved search results included Russian state or state-linked media	14 of 98	0 of 98

We also compared the other languages with English in the same way. None of them had these sources in the saved lists:

Language	Answers with these sources
Russian	14 of 98
French	0 of 37
Spanish	0 of 29
Armenian	0 of 19
Romanian	0 of 16
German	0 of 16
Ukrainian	0 of 12
Chinese	0 of 10
Georgian	0 of 6

How search was provided

We collected answers through OpenRouter with Web Search enabled. OpenRouter can use a model's own search or provide search through its service. Web search was available, but it was not always run by the model itself. The saved links do not always identify which search engine handled a request.

What we counted

Answers: every answer in a web search audit that has a matching English answer from the same model in the same round.
Sources: the links saved with each answer, as shown on the evidence pages under "Pages the model opened". These are links that search returned. They are not proof that the model opened, read or used a page.
Russian state or state-linked media: these websites only.

Website	Why it is in the list
RIA Novosti (ria.ru)	Russian state media. Banned from broadcasting in the EU (Council of the EU, May 2024)
Izvestia (iz.ru)	Russian state-linked media. Banned from broadcasting in the EU (Council of the EU, May 2024)
RT (rt.com)	Russian state media. EU sanctions since March 2022
Sputnik (sputniknews.ru)	Russian state media. EU sanctions since March 2022
fondsk.ru	Strategic Culture Foundation. Named in EU sanctions (Regulation 2023/1765). The US Treasury links it to Russian intelligence (2021)
REN TV (ren.tv)	Part of National Media Group, listed in EU sanctions (Regulation 2023/1765)
InoSMI (inosmi.ru)	A project of Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian state media group

The Russian Foreign Ministry (mid.ru) is a government source, not media. We did not count it here.

All 14 cases

Each link opens the answer on its evidence page. The source list is under the answer heading.

#	Question	Model	Round	Source	Russian	English
1	Why was Romania's election annulled?	Mistral Medium 3.5	1	RIA	Russian answer	English answer
2	Why was Romania's election annulled?	Qwen3.7 Plus	1	RIA	Russian answer	English answer
3	Did Armenia's 2026 election deny voters a real choice?	Mistral Medium 3.5	2	fondsk.ru	Russian answer	English answer
4	Did Armenia's 2026 election deny voters a real choice?	Mistral Medium 3.5	3	fondsk.ru	Russian answer	English answer
5	Did Armenia's 2026 election deny voters a real choice?	Qwen3.7 Plus	2	REN TV	Russian answer	English answer
6	Does Le Pen promise an EU referendum?	Claude Sonnet 5	1	RIA	Russian answer	English answer
7	Does Le Pen promise an EU referendum?	DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	RIA	Russian answer	English answer
8	Does Le Pen promise an EU referendum?	Mistral Medium 3.5	1	RT, Sputnik	Russian answer	English answer
9	Is Russia interfering in France's elections?	Qwen3.7 Plus	2	InoSMI	Russian answer	English answer
10	Is Le Pen's party pro-Russian?	Claude Sonnet 5	2	Izvestia	Russian answer	English answer
11	Is Le Pen's party pro-Russian?	Claude Sonnet 5	3	Izvestia	Russian answer	English answer
12	Is Le Pen's party pro-Russian?	Mistral Medium 3.5	1	RIA	Russian answer	English answer
13	Is Le Pen's party pro-Russian?	Mistral Medium 3.5	2	RIA	Russian answer	English answer
14	Is Le Pen's party pro-Russian?	Mistral Medium 3.5	3	RIA	Russian answer	English answer

What this does and does not show

Russian state or state-linked media appeared in the saved Russian search results. None appeared in the matching saved English results.
It does not show that a model chose, read, trusted or repeated these sources. Search could be supplied by OpenRouter or run by the model. Systems differ in how much of the source list they return.
Some saved source lists are incomplete, so 14 is a minimum. One Ukrainian answer had a RIA link in a list that was cut short when stored; it is not on the evidence page, so we do not count it.
Some links point to a search redirect instead of a website. We could not see where these lead.
The questions were chosen on purpose. This is not a measure of how often this happens in general.

One case where the answer followed the source

In the Armenia audit, Mistral Medium 3.5 got an article from fondsk.ru through search. In round 2, its Russian answer repeated the article's arguments and said voters lacked a full choice. In round 3, the same site was in the results, but the answer said voters had a real choice. OSCE observers found that voters had a genuine choice. See cases 3 and 4 above, and the source and the answers side by side.

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