By BIOENGINEER.ORG
Publication Date: 2026-10-28 02:23:00
Chatbots answering questions about male infertility changed markedly between 2025 and 2026, but not all of them changed for the better, according to a repeated evaluation published in Basic and Clinical Andrology.
The central finding was that performance evolved in a model-specific rather than uniformly progressive manner. ChatGPT improved significantly across all four scored domains after its underlying model was updated from ChatGPT-4o to ChatGPT-5.5. DeepSeek, which had been the weakest performer in 2025, showed the most pronounced year-on-year improvement, particularly in reliability and expert opinion scores. Perplexity, by contrast, became easier to read but lost ground on global quality and expert-rated clinical usefulness, despite remaining the platform most consistently associated with citations in the earlier assessment.
The study was designed as a repeated cross-sectional comparison. The authors chose male infertility because it is a guideline-sensitive field in which inaccurate or incomplete information can affect diagnostic evaluation, counseling and treatment expectations. Because the relevant male infertility recommendations remained largely stable between the 2025 and 2026 EAU Sexual and Reproductive Health Guidelines, any change in chatbot performance could be attributed more plausibly to changes in model behavior, retrieval strategy and source selection than to shifts in the underlying clinical reference standard.
The question set was built by…
