Wrong About You: what five AI engines state about 70 software vendors

The findings

• 5346 answers named the 70 vendors (the five most named in each of 14 categories of the Absence Index release 2026-09).
• They made 2922 factual statements about those vendors (one claim as stated by one engine): 1924 true, 113 wrong, 5 stale and 880 unverifiable against the vendors' own pages.
• Wrong or stale among verifiable statements: 118 of 2042 (5.8 percent, 95 percent interval 4.8 to 6.9).
• Answers carrying at least one wrong or stale statement about the vendor they name: 175 of 5346 (3.3 percent, 95 percent interval 2.8 to 3.8).

Unverifiable counts as neither right nor wrong. Counts come before rates; every rate carries a 95 percent Wilson interval, descriptive because statements from one answer or one engine are not independent.

Per engine

Per category

What kind of statement

Where the wrong and stale statements came from

How sure: in how many of the three runs the engine said it

Every vendor, with its category median

Method

Answers. Every valid target answer in the Absence Index release 2026-09 that names one of the 70 vendors under the release's own matching rule; their number equals each vendor's published named count. Five engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode), ten buyer questions per category, three scheduled runs, captured under method v1.1 on 22 to 23 Sep 2026 for the Absence Index release 2026-09 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22907695). No new answer was captured for this study.

Statements and classes. Thirteen statement types: pricing, plans, free tier, founding, ownership, headquarters, product names, integrations, platforms, certifications, customer counts, acquisitions and discontinued products. Each claim is classed true, wrong, stale or unverifiable under the published Record rules (broadcastwell.com/methodology#record-rules) against the vendor's own pages read once on 8 October 2026, with a verbatim quote from the page for every true, wrong or stale claim. A script checks every quote against the deposit and the page read. Every row shows its actual review state. Only a statement signed by two distinct analysts with a real date may show the verified mark. Review changes are logged in data/review_log.csv; source provenance corrections are logged in data/provenance_log.csv.

Causes and confidence. A wrong or stale claim's causing page is a page cited by the answers carrying it that carries the statement, typed own page, directory, review site, press, forum or other; otherwise "cause not found". Confidence is the number of the three runs in which the engine stated the claim.

Differences from the Record Check. The Record Check captures fresh answers by hand and a reviewer classes them. This study reuses the September answers, traces causes through the answers' own citations only, and reads the vendors' pages on 8 October 2026. A page whose robots.txt disallows automated agents was not read; its claims stay unverifiable.

What this does not prove

Wrong About You records what five AI engines stated about 70 vendors in answer to buyer questions on stated dates, classed against each vendor's own published facts. It makes no claim about what any buyer was told or decided. "Wrong" means the statement contradicted the vendor's published fact on the capture date; "stale" means it was true before a documented change; "unverifiable" means the vendor's own pages did not settle it. A causing page is the page that carried the statement, not proof that the engine read it. The vendors are the subjects of the engines' statements, not their authors; a wrong statement about a vendor says nothing about the vendor's product.

Disputes and citation

Any named company may request one no-cost re-run at index@broadcastwell.com; both results are published.

Cite as: Broadcastwell (2026). Wrong About You: what five AI engines state about 70 software vendors (Version 1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23270124. All versions: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23270123.

The Record Check

Broadcastwell ran this study and sells the Record Check for one company, $490. Get the Record Check. The study data, classifications and code are public. Correction Desk.