According to a study posted on Hacker News, it was found that 34.7% of the citations attached by Perplexity's search models to sentences containing numbers either lead to pages that cannot be opened or to pages that do not contain the specific number in question.
34.7% of Perplexity Citations Containing Numbers Do Not Contain the Corresponding Value on the Referenced Page
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In the verification, 310 factual questions regarding 210 technology companies were posed to two Perplexity models, and all citations in the generated answers were retrieved and cross-referenced.
Citation failures are not primarily caused by broken links. Broken links accounted for only 1.3% of the cited URLs.
The main factors were citations to pages that general readers cannot access (gated pages) and citations to pages that are accessible but do not contain the numerical value mentioned in the text.
In Perplexity's responses using the sonar model, at least one URL that a general reader cannot open was cited in 84.2% of all answers.
Furthermore, the figure of 34.7% only counts cases where the page contains no numerical value mentioned in the text at all, suggesting the actual number may be higher.
--- Source: A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for (Hacker News Frontpage, 2026-09-02)