{
  "id": 17083366,
  "title": "Only 40% of AI-cited statistics trace back to a study",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/29/only-40-of-ai-cited-statistics-trace-back-to-a-study",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-29T15:06:17.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News",
    "slug": "hacker-news",
    "url": "https://trakkr.ai/trakkr-research/zombie-stats"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "The analysis of 1,285 statistics cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews found that only 40% of the numbers could be traced back to a study or research. The remaining 60% either stopped at a source that could not be verified, led to pages without a study, or didn’t provide any source at all. This means that out of the statistics presented, 40% had a clear origin in a legitimate study, while the rest were either sourced from questionable or unverifiable pages.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}