AI search engines often make up citations and answers: Study – Search Engine Land
AI search engines and chatbots often provide wrong answers and make up article citations, according to a new study from Columbia Journalism Review.
Why we care. AI search tools have ramped up the scraping of your content so they can serve answers to their users, often resulting in no clicks to your website. Also, click-through rates from AI search and chatbots are much lower than Google Search, according to a separate, unrelated study. But hallucinating citations makes an already bad situation even worse.
By the numbers. More than half of the responses from Gemini and Grok 3 cited fabricated or broken URLs that led to error pages. Also, according to the study:
- Overall, chatbots provided incorrect answers to more than 60% of queries:
- Grok 3 (the highest error rate) answered 94% of the queries incorrectly.
- Gemini only provided a completely correct response on one occasion (in 10 attempts).
- Perplexity, which had the lowest error rate, answered 37% of queries incorrectly.
What they…
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