What happened
Trakkr traced 1,285 statistics produced by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews and found just 40% were supported by research.
Why it matters
A 40% support rate means most numbers these assistants repeat carry no verifiable study behind them, so readers citing them may be passing on unsupported figures.
WHO IT HITSAnalysts, marketers and anyone who pulls statistics from AI chatbot answers for reports or sales decks are most exposed, since the cited figures often trace back to company blogs rather than studies.
Summaries like this, every morning.
The study's central finding is not that AI invents numbers. Trakkr reports that in most cases the AI did not fabricate figures, and 82% of the time the cited page actually contained the number quoted. The problem sits one step further back: only 21% of the pages cited as the source of a number clearly linked to an original research paper.
That gap widens because of where the assistants pull from. Company blogs made up 54% of cited pages, and those pages were research-backed only 37% of the time, compared with 62% for research-firm pages and 61% for government pages. News pages and statistics roundups were backed at 37% and 35% respectively.
The 44% salesperson figure illustrates the chain. All five tools repeated it, and Google's AI Overviews linked to a 2017 sample article by a freelance writer that carried the number in its headline but offered no study behind it. Trakkr notes ChatGPT alone flagged that the basis was unclear.
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