GBN Media / Blog / The Signal research
Brand research · 6 July 2026 · 7 min read
What Britain thinks of GB News.
We commissioned everyday people, an independent research agency, to study the GB News brand, and agreed to publish the full framework whichever way it fell. Here is the whole picture, chart by chart, including where we trail.
Every media owner says planners misjudge them. Almost none commission a nationally representative study, agree in advance to publish every finding and put the results next to six brands with decades of head start. That is what the Signal research is.
Built to find out, not to flatter
The study was run by everyday people, whose Signal framework has been applied across more than twenty categories. Fieldwork ran in May 2026 with 2,017 UK adults aged 16 and over, nationally representative: the whole population, not a hand-picked audience. GB News was tested against Sky News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Mail, The Mirror and The Express.
The framework builds on mental availability, the idea from How Brands Grow that brands grow by being easy to think of when people choose. Signal measures share of category entry points and adds three shortcuts people lean on. Fitness: is this brand successful and reliable? Social norms: what do I think everyone else thinks of it? Values: does it fit how I see the world? Emotion is measured alongside. Each share is calculated the same way, so the comparisons are like for like.
The headline: almost half of Britain is open to GB News
The single most commercially useful number in the study is consideration. Asked whether they would consider GB News, 44 per cent of UK adults said yes: level with The Telegraph, two points off The Mail, five off The Guardian. A media plan that excludes GB News on assumption rather than evidence is setting aside a brand almost half the population is open to.
Consideration · top two box (%)Would consider the brand
Five years in, recalled alongside brands a century older
Unprompted recall is the hardest measure in brand research: respondents write in the news brands they can think of, with no list to jog them. Most established news brands score under 15 per cent. GB News, which launched in 2021, records 10 per cent, alongside The Guardian and The Times and ahead of The Telegraph and The Mirror.
Spontaneous brand awareness · all mentions (%)Unprompted recall across the news set
The honest counterpoint, published with everything else: prompted awareness, at 64 per cent, is still the lowest of the competitive set. Awareness is the thing time and marketing fix, and the trajectory five years in is the point.
Second on the reasons people actually come to news
Category entry points are the buying situations of news: wanting topics for conversation, feeling part of a community, curiosity, entertainment, understanding how the news affects daily life. On share of category entry points, GB News ranks second in the category, behind only Sky News and ahead of The Guardian. Its strongest links are providing topics for conversation, where it leads The Guardian, and connecting people to a community.
Share of category entry points (%)The reasons people come to news
Look inside the entry points and the picture sharpens. On the most commercially useful reason to come to news, providing topics for conversation, GB News is second only to Sky News, ahead of The Guardian:
% association · provides topics for conversationThe water-cooler brand, in the top two
The same second place repeats on connecting to community, explaining how the news affects daily life and being entertaining, with third on curiosity. And among people who actually used each brand in the last four weeks, GB News is joint first in the whole category on feeling part of a community:
% association among each brand's last-four-week usersJoint first on community, among people who actually use the brands
Third on values, and not the profile the market predicts
The values measure adapts the World Values Survey: universal human values, not brand slogans. GB News ranks third in the category on share of values, level with The Telegraph, and places third on self-direction (creativity, freedom, curiosity) and on universalism (broad-mindedness, social justice). Its weakest value is tradition. Whatever the industry assumed the profile would be, this is not it.
Share of values (%)Worldview fit across the news category
Put the four signals together, and a five-year-old brand outranks century-old ones
Across the whole framework GB News holds a 14 per cent share of signal, joint third with The Telegraph. It is ahead of The Mail, The Mirror and The Express, brands with decades or a century of head start.
Share of signal (%) · all adultsJoint third in the category, five years from launch
Distinctive, which is what a challenger needs
The study's brand map places GB News in its own territory: closest to community, conversation and entertainment, and to self-direction values, away from the crowded cluster where the legacy brands sit on top of one another. For a challenger brand, distinctiveness is the asset; the full map is part of the walkthrough.
A signal the size of the brand, and growing
Share of signal (14 per cent) sits right on the brand's claimed monthly reach (13 per cent): a healthy brand whose mental presence matches its footprint. Several longer-established names in the set cannot say the same.
The emotional context your advertising is seen in
Across the full range of emotions measured, GB News holds the second-largest share of emotion in the category, 16 per cent against Sky News on 18. More useful still is the shape of it: GB News differentiates on energised positive emotion. Britain associates the brand with feeling excited and delighted more strongly than almost any competitor, and attention follows arousal. That is the emotional context in which advertising on GB News is seen.
% association · feeling excitedSecond on excitement, behind only Sky News
Share of emotion (%) · all adultsSecond-largest share of emotion in the category
The study's emotion map makes the differentiation plain: GB News sits with excited and delighted, the energised, positive corner, while most of the category clusters around calmer, flatter territory. Attention follows arousal, and advertising in an excited environment starts with more of it.
One brand, one signal, every age and social grade
The objection the study answers most cleanly is composition: the assumption that the GB News brand only means something to one generation. Share of signal is near-identical across every age band and both social grade groups, and even people who do not consume GB News at all give it a 10 per cent share.
Share of signal by group (%)The signal barely moves across the population
Where GB News trails, published with everything else
Two signals lag: fitness (perceived success, quality and financial strength) and social norms (what I believe others think), both at 11 per cent. Both are functions of brand age; every leader on them has decades of tenure, and GB News already sits level with The Mail and ahead of The Mirror and The Express. At year five, the trajectory is the story rather than the position. Publishing this is precisely what makes the leading numbers credible.
Level with The Mail at year five, ahead of The Mirror and The Express, with the leaders all carrying decades of tenure. This chart is in here because we said we would publish everything, and because a study that only contained good news would persuade nobody.
What this means for a media plan
Three things. First, exclusion has a measurable cost: the excluded brand is considered by 44 per cent of the country and carries the category's second-strongest link to the reasons people come to news. Second, the composition objection does not survive contact with the data: the signal is flat across ages and social grades. Third, the environment argument gains a brand dimension: an audience that associates the brand with excitement and delight is a high-attention context for advertising, and the study finds the public already perceives GB News as a place where advertising signals success.
Methodology: online quantitative survey by everyday people, 2,017 UK adults 16+, nationally representative, fieldwork May 2026. Competitive set: Sky News, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Mail, The Mirror, The Express. All signals published in full. Full entry on the Sources page.