forked from bchanot/claude
Bastien Chanot
9da1dec9e6
Audited each statistic in agents/resources/ against primary sources after the VSI fiction (I2) showed WebSearch launders SEO-blog consensus. The failure mode is not invention — it is plausible recombination, which is what a model half-remembering a search result produces: - "Adding statistics increases AI visibility by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al.)" — paper real (KDD 2024), number real, SCOPE WRONG: 40% is the aggregate over the whole method set, domain-dependent. No per-technique figure exists. - "Pages not updated quarterly are 3x more likely to lose AI citations (LLMRefs)" — LLMrefs' actual 3x says brand mentions correlate ~3x more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks. DIFFERENT SUBJECT. No source supports a quarterly decay multiplier. - "QAPage cited 58% more often than Article" — uncited. Nearest real number: AccuraCast 2025, `Person` schema at 58.9% PREVALENCE among cited sources — wrong type, and its FAQPage figure (1.8%) points the opposite way to the claim it propped up. This one drove Tier 1 ranking. - "62% of searches involve voice" — uncited; 62% circulates as smart-speaker ADOPTION. Same family as the "50% by 2020" myth ComScore denied (origin: a 2014 Andrew Ng interview). Corrected my own framing too: I claimed three times these stats "drive axis weights". They do not — the weight tables carry no citations. They drive Tier/priority recommendations and, worse, geo-analyzer's "Cite sources" rule pushed them into CLIENT reports as research-backed. Fixes: recommendations kept on mechanism, fabricated numbers removed with the incident documented inline so they are not re-added. Unverified stats (48% AI Overviews, 2.5B queries/day, Gartner -25%) labelled [UNVERIFIED] rather than asserted or deleted — I did not check them. Structural, not just exhortation: resources/README.md now mandates `<claim> — <source, year, venue|vendor> — measured: <what the source ACTUALLY measured> — <link>`. `measured:` is the field that catches this — all four errors survive a source name; none survives stating the real measurement next to the claim. WebSearch demoted from verification to crawler/tool-name lookup only. Verified: make test 35 GREEN / 0 RED.