A new study from Columbia Journalism Review showed that AI search engines and chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Deepseek Search, Microsoft Copilot, Grok and Google's Gemini, are just wrong, way too often.
I have said this time and time again, when I see an AI Answer, at this point, I just skip over it because I know I cannot trust it and this proves that. I know it will get better over time, but until that time, I just skip reading them, because I know, well too often, it is wrong.
The study said, "Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly."
Here is a chart showing this data by each AI search engine they tested:
Plus, many of these search engines and "chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences."
And the study said, "Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles."
Plus, they just make up citations and links, well too often:
You can read all the data over here - but I am not at all shocked by this study, as I said above.
Forum discussion at X.
