Can You Trust Perplexity’s Citations? A 16-Claim Verification Protocol

A citation badge is a route to evidence, not evidence that the answer used it correctly. A search assistant can point to a real government page and still reverse a trend, carry forward an old year, merge two populations, or attach the page to a sentence it does not support. The useful decision is therefore not “Does this answer have citations?” but “Can a reviewer trace each consequential claim to the exact passage, date, population, and unit that support it?”

If you need a product-level introduction before testing a workflow, Trust Vault’s guide to Perplexity AI explains its search and answer modes. This article adds an operational test: a 16-prompt, claim-by-claim audit that a team can run before an AI-search summary is copied into research, a customer response, or an internal decision. The test below is a reusable protocol, not a claim that we ran Perplexity on these prompts.…