Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
It’s a known fact that ChatGPT, Gemini, and most AI chatbots hallucinate answers sometimes. They make up things out of thin air, lie to please you, and contort their answers the moment you challenge them. Although those are becoming more rare instances, they still happen, and they completely ruin trust. If I never know when Gemini is saying the truth and when it’s lying to me, what’s the point of even using it?
That’s why I mostly gravitate towards Perplexity for my search queries. I like seeing the sources in front of me and being able to click to read more from trustworthy sites. Then it occurred to me: There’s a way I can make Gemini behave more like Perplexity, and all it takes is a single sentence!
I’ve been using this trick for a few months and the results are genuinely game-changing for me. I can’t go back to Gemini without it now.
I added one very clear instruction under my Gemini “Saved info”
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
It’s been several months since Google added the option to feed Gemini specific information or sets of instructions to personalize it to your likes and expectations, and I’ve been making great use of this Saved info feature since then. One of the first bits I saved was this: Every answer should come with at least 3 links to source pages I can click on to read more. That’s it. I added this as a new thing for Gemini to remember under Settings & help > Saved info (web) or profile picture > Saved info (mobile app) or by going to this Saved info URL. And once it was done, Gemini understood that it should always share sources and links with me once it’s done with its main answer. I didn’t have to repeat this sentence with every question or message; no, it just became a ground rule for it.
Gemini provides sources about 20% of the time without being asked. By adding this simple instruction, I raised that to 90%.
While it’s true that Gemini does offer a “Sources and related content” button sometimes at the end of its answer, that has been super unreliable and capricious to show up in my experience. I’d say I get it on about 20% of my answers. The forced instruction, though? It works about 90% of the time, and I know exactly why it doesn’t appear in the remaining 10%. It’s often in situations where I have another set of rules (be brief for the weather, share a map when recommending places, etc.) that Gemini skips this instruction and doesn’t share the three sources. The rest of the time, those three links are reliably waiting for me and have consistently been very relevant to my question or query.
Gemini’s sources help me verify its claims and get more info I was in Mulhouse last week and wanted to visit Basel for the day and catch the Women’s Euro quarter-final game between France and Germany. I looked for public transport options for tourists in Basel, but all I could find was the Basel Card, which is given for free to any overnight guest at a hotel in the city. That wasn’t relevant for me, though. What do other people use to pay for transport? I asked Gemini, and it told me to use the day ticket from TNW, the local transit company. Gemini ended by giving me links to read about and buy this day ticket, which helped me verify that it actually exists, check the prices for different zones, and find kiosks to buy it too. The links acted as both verification and extra information, and I found them extremely useful because of that.
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