Robinhood Cortex Digests: missing on web, working on mobile

Robinhood announced Cortex Digests for UK users in August 2025. The marketing called it an AI feature that summarises news and technicals in plain English for “Robinhood customers.” I opened my UK ISA on the Robinhood website today and looked for it — on META, on BMNR, on the portfolio dashboard, on the Legend chart workspace. Not visible anywhere. Then I opened the mobile app and went to META. There it was. Same account, same stock, same day, two different products.

This is a Robinhood Cortex Digests review, but it’s also a smaller observation about what counts as a product.

A feature you've announced is not the same as a feature your users can see.

On the Robinhood UK website the feature isn’t there. On the mobile app, it is. The verdict that follows splits the same way: useful where it exists, missing where many of us actually research.

What Cortex Digests showed on the web#

The dixon.ai test was a Playwright session against my logged-in UK ISA account, 1440×900 viewport, four places in sequence:

1. META detail page — stock rendered at $610.05, full layout present (chart, About, Key statistics, Related lists, News, Trading Trends, Analyst ratings). No Digest panel. Searched the page text for digest or cortex — zero matches.
2. BMNR detail page — stock at $19.81, same layout shape. No Digest panel. Same page-text search: nothing.
3. Portfolio dashboard — loaded the classic UK home view. No Digest panel. Same: nothing.
4. Robinhood Legend — the chart workspace. No Digest panel. Same: nothing.

Robinhood’s August 2025 launch announcement said Cortex Digests was “free to all UK customers at launch” and noted it was “not available for every company or security” — coverage is gated by page-view metrics, per the methodology page. META is one of the most-viewed names on the platform. If Cortex was live for UK web accounts, this is where it would appear.

What the mobile app actually shows#

Then I opened the mobile app on the same account and tapped through to META. The Digest panel sits inline on the detail page, above the “About Meta Platforms” section, labelled clearly with a Digests → chevron. The headline read: “Meta Platforms down 0.68% from Friday’s close amid strong Q1 earnings and rising debt concerns.” Below it: “Updated 7m ago · AI-powered, not advice.”

Tapping the chevron opens the full reading view. It is structured: two named sub-sections, plain English, with verifiable numbers. The first sub-section, “Strong Q1 earnings”, reads:

Meta reported Q1 2026 results on April 29, showing 33% revenue growth to $56.31 billion and a 62% rise in diluted EPS to $10.44. Advertising demand and AI infrastructure investments drove strong operating income growth despite heavy capital spending. The Family of Apps segment led revenue gains, while Reality Labs remained a loss-making unit. No updated full-year guidance was provided.

The second, “Senior notes offering”, picks up the May 4 $25bn debt issuance — six maturities, coupons from 4.55% to 6.45%, the implications for interest expense.

The numbers track. $56.31bn is what Meta reported. 33% year-on-year growth is correct. $10.44 diluted EPS is correct. The $25bn senior notes offering on May 4 happened. The Digest does what its disclaimer says it does — passive news synthesis with sources behind it, presented as text not as a recommendation.

It does this well enough that, on the right name, it would save you opening three tabs. That’s the use case Robinhood marketed and that’s what it does: a quick mobile-app news summary on big, well-known companies.

What’s missing — even on mobile#

The wins above are narrow. The same screenshots are the evidence for what isn’t there.

There’s no options data. The methodology page is explicit about this: options and futures are out of scope. For anyone running a covered-call income strategy — the central use case for an active Robinhood account, mine included — the AI feature in the platform says nothing about the chain you’re actually trading. Not the strike, not implied volatility, not the premium quality. That isn’t a bug. It is the product boundary. But it means the AI feature attached to your broker is silent on the activity that defines a meaningful share of your time on the broker.

There’s no portfolio-level Digest visible on this account. Portfolio Digests — the portfolio-level version — haven’t been announced for UK accounts. The August 2025 UK launch described Asset-level (single-stock) Digests only; Portfolio Digests have been rolling out to US Robinhood Gold subscribers in early 2026. The mobile test was limited to the META detail page; a portfolio-level mobile view wasn’t captured.

And the coverage wall on less-tracked names is still open. The web test recorded the absence on the small-cap I trade (BMNR); the mobile version hasn’t been tested. The methodology gates Digests by page views — if that rule also runs on mobile, the verdict holds on both web and app. If it doesn’t, the gap is narrower than the methodology page reads.

I'd rather flag the unverified dimension honestly than write a verdict around evidence I don't have.

One provenance note worth carrying. The methodology page lists “aggregated Robinhood customer trading data” as one input to the Digest. That isn’t a conspiracy — Robinhood is up-front about it on the page. It is a thing to hold in mind. The AI summary you read on your broker is partly informed by what other Robinhood customers are doing on the same stock. Sometimes that’s a useful signal; sometimes it’s the noise of retail sentiment lagging the move. It is not the same provenance as an independent research tool, and it shouldn’t be read as one.

Verdict#

If you bank on the AI feature in the Robinhood UK announcement and you’re working from your laptop, open the mobile app. It is useful in one narrow way: a quick way to scan the news on well-known companies — the kind of name where the news is already everywhere and the model’s job is to thin it down. Don’t open it for any decision involving options. Treat it as something to read above your own research, not in place of it.

A product is whatever the user can see. On the Robinhood UK website right now, this product is invisible. That gap will close — Robinhood will either bring Cortex to the web or quietly stop marketing the feature as available to UK customers at large — but the timestamp on these screenshots shows what was true today.