One number, followed. We asked Chat GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews 200 questions that call for a number, the kind people ask every day. Then we clicked the citations, and kept clicking.
Google AI Overviews showed that 44% of salespeople give up after just one follow-up attempt. The number is right there. Its source link goes to a writing sample.
Two clicks in leads to a freelance writer's sample article, online by 2017. The number is in its headline. It lists two slide decks, a blog list and two news stories.
None is a study of follow-ups. That's where it ends. No survey, no sample, no study: every other route to this number we tried stopped at a page that cites no research.
It's a number still walking around with nothing underneath it. That's a zombie stat. Most numbers aren't zombies.
But you can't tell from the answer: a zombie arrives with the same confidence and the same citation, and here, with all five assistants agreeing. We took a random sample of the statistics each assistant cited, 1,285 in all, and walked every trail the same way: the cited page, then that page's source, up to five pages deep. 40% reached a study that says the same thing. Another 8% reached the study, but the number or its context had changed on the way.
The rest never got there: 40% stopped at a source we couldn't check, because it was locked, gone or silent on the number, and 11% led nowhere at all. Four in ten trails reached a study that says the same thing. Each square is one in a hundred of the 1,285 statistics we traced, sorted by where its trail ended.
Chat GPT did best, and quoted the fewest numbers: 1.3 per answer, against 6.8 for Claude. The other four landed between 38% and 46%, too close to rank.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing