AI search engines are mostly wrong: New research

Plus: Which AI search engine is the most inaccurate?

Hi everyone,

Earlier this month, a new study came out about the accuracy of AI search engines:

“AI Search Has A Citation Problem” by Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar

It really blew my mind.

Anyone who has used AI-powered search engines – whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any other – has likely noticed that they often produce incorrect results. However, I didn’t realize the full extent of the problem until I came across this study. The most notable finding is that AI search engines were wrong 60% of the time. Additionally, the study found that AI search engines are likely to violate crawler blocks.

Today I will review some highlights from the study. I recommend reading the original article for many additional nuggets.

For dessert, an AI-generated take on this post!

Methodology

The goal of the study was to determine how effectively chatbots can identify the source of a quote. To that end, the researchers selected quotes from published articles and asked various AI search tools to …