Decision rule
Choose the candidate that produces the highest share of materially supported claims under your source policy—not the longest answer or the largest citation count.
Candidates to evaluate
AI answer engine
Perplexity
Its product is explicitly organized around web answers with citations.
Verify: Open every cited source and test whether it supports the adjacent claim.General AI assistant
ChatGPT
It is a broad assistant candidate for discovery, synthesis, and revision workflows.
Verify: Confirm which web or research tools are available in the product and plan you will use.General AI assistant
Claude
Anthropic presents Claude as a research and analysis assistant with connected-source capabilities on supported surfaces.
Verify: Measure claim support and source traceability on your topic set.General AI assistant
Gemini
It is relevant for teams evaluating research work alongside Google products and model surfaces.
Verify: Record the exact surface, model, and source behavior for every test.Run a fair pilot
- Prepare 20–50 representative questions with primary-source expectations.
- Blind-review material claims for correctness, source authority, and entailment.
- Record missing, inaccessible, duplicated, or contradictory citations separately.
- Repeat a subset later to measure sensitivity to changing web results.
Sources checked
Open the original pages before relying on a time-sensitive product decision.