is a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.
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ChatGPT is using Grokipedia as a source, and it’s not the only AI tool to do so. Citations to Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia are starting to appear in answers from Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, too. Data suggests that’s on the rise, heightening concerns about accuracy and misinformation as Musk seeks to reshape reality in his image.
Since the warped Wikipedia-clone launched late last October, Grokipedia technically remains a minor source of information overall. Glen Allsopp, head of marketing strategy and research at SEO company Ahrefs, told The Verge the firm’s testing found Grokipedia referenced in more than 263,000 ChatGPT responses from 13.6 million prompts, citing roughly 95,000 individual Grokipedia pages. By comparison, Allsopp said the English-language Wikipedia showed up in 2.9 million responses. “They’re quite a way off, but it’s still impressive for how new they are,” he said.
“They’re quite a way off, but it’s still impressive for how new they are.”
Based on a dataset tracking billions of citations, marketing platform Profound researcher Sartaj Rajpal said Grokipedia received around 0.01 to 0.02 percent of all ChatGPT citations per day — a small share but one that has steadily increased since mid-November.
Semrush, which tracks how brands show up in Google tools’ AI answers with its AI Visibility Toolkit, found a similar step-up in Grokipedia’s visibility in AI answers from December, but noted it’s still very much a secondary source compared to established reference platforms like Wikipedia.
Grokipedia citations appear on ChatGPT more than on any other platform that analysts The Verge spoke to are tracking. However, Semrush found a similar spike in Google’s AI products — Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode — in December. Ahrefs’ Allsopp said Grokipedia had been referenced in around 8,600 Gemini answers, 567 AI Overviews answers, 7,700 Copilot answers, and 2 Perplexity answers, from around 9.5 million, 120 million, 14 million, and 14 million prompts, respectively, with appearances in Gemini and Perplexity down significantly from similar testing the month before. None of the firms The Verge spoke to track citations for Anthropic’s Claude, though several anecdotal reports on social media suggest the chatbot is also citing Grokipedia as a source.
In many cases, AI tools appear to be citing Grokipedia to answer niche, obscure, or highly specific factual questions, as The Guardian reported late last week. Analysts agree. Jim Yu, CEO of analytics firm BrightEdge, told The Verge that ChatGPT and AI Overviews use Grokipedia for largely “non-sensitive queries” like encyclopedic lookups and definitions, though differences are emerging in how much authority they afford it. For AI Overviews, Grokipedia tends not to stand alone, Yu said, and “typically appears alongside several other sources” as “a supplementary reference rather than a primary source.” When ChatGPT uses Grokipedia as a source, however, it gives it much more authority, Yu said, “often featuring it as one of the first sources cited for a query.”
In a comment to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo said: “When ChatGPT searches the web, it aims to draw from a broad range of publicly available sources and viewpoints relevant to the user’s question.” Amdo also said that users can see the sources and judge them themselves: “We apply safety filters to reduce the risk of surfacing links associated with high-severity harms, and ChatGPT clearly shows which sources informed a response through citations, allowing users to explore and assess the reliability of sources directly.”
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