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AI assistants cite 'zombie' stats that vanish on fact-check
What is Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from?
Researchers asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews 200 number-based questions and traced 1,285 cited statistics back to their sources. They found many figures lead to unrelated blog posts, slide decks, or dead ends, showing the numbers often have no real study behind them.
Who it is for
If you use AI-generated data for decisions or content, you need to verify the original source before trusting the figure.
How to try it
open https://trakkr.ai/trakkr-research/zombie-stats