How do I fact-check an AI answer quickly?

Find every date, number, name and quote. Check each against the organisation's own page or the original document. Ignore the connective prose — it is not making claims. A typical answer has five to ten items and takes a minute or two.

What if I cannot find a source for a claim?

Then treat the claim as unverified and do not use it. Do not ask the model for a source, because it will produce a plausible one. For a quote in particular, no source means it was composed.

Can AI check its own answers?

It can find the checkable claims in an answer, which is useful and what the exercise above does. It cannot verify them — it has no way to read the source unless it has a browsing feature, and even then it can misread the page. The verification is yours.

Are AI answers with numbers more reliable?

No. Numbers are the easiest thing for a model to get plausibly wrong — a percentage off by ten, a price from last year, a limit that changed. Round, tidy numbers in particular deserve a second look.

Verifying important claims: date, number, name, quote — When AI Is Wrong

You cannot check everything, and you do not need to. Most of an AI answer is connective prose that is neither true nor false — it is structure. The risk lives in four kinds of specific claim, and they are easy to spot because they look different from the words around them.

The four-item check

1
Dates
Any year, month, day or "since". Check against the organisation's own timeline or announcement. Models drift dates by a year or two constantly, and a wrong date on a rule or a price makes everything after it wrong too.
2
Numbers
Prices, percentages, counts, limits. Check against the vendor page, the official statistics release, or the document itself. Round numbers are a warning sign: real figures are rarely tidy.
3
Names
People, products, versions, organisations. Check that the person exists and holds the role, and that the product version is real. Models blend two real names into one plausible fake with ease.
4
Quotes
Anything in quotation marks attributed to someone. Search the exact phrase. If it appears nowhere but the AI answer, it was composed, not quoted — this is the most common and most damaging hallucination in professional use.

Practise on a paragraph

The paragraph below is a made-up press release. Ask the model to pull out every checkable claim and sort it by type — this is the step people skip, and it is the step that makes the rest fast.

Try it

Extract every checkable claim

Three free runs a day on the site key. Add your own key for unlimited runs.

What the extraction should produce, and where each item would be checked if the company were real.
Type	Claims from the paragraph	Where to check
Dates	14 August 2026; founded 2011; "early next year"	The company's own announcement or company register
Numbers	$3.2 million; third purchase; 47 staff; 12 depots	The announcement; the regulator's filing if listed
Names	Harbourline Logistics; Northgate Freight; Dana Whitfield, chief executive	Company register; the company's leadership page
Quotes	"double our regional capacity by early next year"	Search the exact phrase; it must appear in the source

Knowledge check

An AI summary of a report includes: "The report found a 38% rise in complaints, and the author, Dr Elena Marsh, called it 'a system under real strain'." What do you check, in order?

Verifying important claims: date, number, name, quote

Practise on a paragraph

Lesson FAQ

Stop overpaying for AI tools