By QUASA Editorial Team
Publication Date: 2026-10-08 07:00:00
Perplexity has the stronger published result for open-web source credibility. In an EACL evaluation of 100 claims across five misinformation-prone topics, its cited-source credibility averaged 86.30%, compared with 75.16% for GPT-4o and 71.37% for GPT-5. The evaluation reflects web-search behavior from the second half of 2025, rather than a comparison of current deep-research modes.
ChatGPT deep research may be the better choice when an assignment requires approved websites or a report whose source access and direction can be changed during the run. Perplexity is a compelling choice for investigating contested claims on the public web. The deciding factor is the evidence set: whether the assistant must discover credible sources or work within sources you have already defined.
What the credibility finding measures
A citation answers only part of the research question. A linked page may be reputable yet fail to support the sentence beside it; a closely matched page may come from a weak source. The evaluation examined both the credibility of cited domains and whether factual statements were grounded in the material cited. Perplexity led on source selection under those test conditions, giving its open-web case a firmer basis than answer fluency or citation count alone.
The researchers classified cited domains using factuality ratings and categories such as government and research publications. Unrated domains were excluded from the credibility-rate calculation. That makes the…
