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

Haus Research audited Perplexity's two search models across 310 factual questions about tech companies. Of 1,826 citations attached to sentences with figures, 34.7% pointed to pages that either wouldn't open or contained none of the numbers from that sentence. Scored per claim, 14.4% fail. Dead links are only 1.3%; the bigger problems are paywalled pages (16.1%) and open pages that don't carry the cited figure. Example: asked for Vercel's cheapest paid plan, the model answered $20/month and cited Vercel's pricing page, which contains no '$20'. For headquarters, models produced exact street addresses and cited Wikipedia articles that contain none of those addresses. The report also flags a pattern of SEO-spam pages generated per query template, later taken down, that the models cited as sources. The post does not include a response from Perplexity.

Why it matters: Haus Research tested Perplexity's two search models with 310 questions, manually verified 1,826 citations attached to numerical claims, and found 34.7% of links either inaccessible or mismatched. Methodology is transparent and sample size is solid—this isn't a casual dunk. Hel...