What's New in Ask the Source

Release dates

• Sandbox - Monday, October 26, 2026
• Production - Monday, November 2, 2026

Release summary

This release introduces a new Metrics dashboard in the Ask the Source Admin, giving your team a single, self-serve view into how Ask the Source is performing for your organization — answer quality, content safety, freshness, and performance, all in one place.

The dashboard organizes metrics into five focused sections:

• Usage & Answer Quality — Track query volume and answer-quality signals in one place.
• Cache Freshness — See how current the content behind your answers is, including a cache invalidations widget that shows when cached content is refreshed.
• Content Safety & Guardrails — Monitor the guardrails that keep answers grounded, with visibility into premise-check and date-scoping outcomes.
• Search & API Traffic — Understand how queries map to your content, including search results returned per query and API request latency broken out by endpoint.
• Response Latency — Follow end-to-end responsiveness, including an answer generation latency widget.

New widgets include cache invalidations, premise-check outcomes, date-scoping outcomes, search results per query, answer generation latency, and per-endpoint API request latency.

Users affected

Ask the Source Admin users

Action required

None. The Metrics dashboard is enabled per organization — if you don’t see it after the release dates, contact your Arc XP account team to have it turned on.

Release dates

• Sandbox and Production - Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Release summary

We’re excited to announce the initial release of Ask the Source, a new AI-powered Q&A experience that helps users quickly find answers cited in your journalism, while capturing first-party reader intent.

This initial launch delivers the core Ask the Source experience, including AI-generated answers based on eligible news content, source attribution to supporting articles, and a conversational interface for exploring news topics more efficiently.

Highlights include:

• Natural language Q&A – Ask questions about the news in plain language.
• Grounded responses – AI-generated answers are based on published news content with links to supporting articles.
• Conversational exploration – Ask follow-up questions to dive deeper into topics.
• Fast discovery – Find relevant information without manually searching across multiple stories.

This is the initial public release of Ask the Source. Additional enhancements and feature updates will be delivered in future releases as we continue to refine the experience based on user feedback. See Ask the Source in the Arc XP Learning Center for more information.

Users affected

Current Arc XP Platform customers

Action required

Interested in adding Ask the Source to your Arc XP platform? Reach out to your Technical Account Manager to learn more about licensing, availability, and the steps to get started.