A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for

A study found that 34.7% of Perplexity's citations for factual claims containing numbers either led to inaccessible pages or pages that didn't contain the cited figures. Researchers tested the AI search models with 310 factual questions about technology companies and checked whether the 2,511 citation markers provided actually supported the claims made, finding that the failure was not due to dead links (only 1.3%) but rather gated pages or pages lacking the referenced data. When measured per claim rather than per citation, 14.4% of claims failed, meaning at least one source could verify the figure stated.