Verified against Perplexity Pro · 2026-07-12
Audit a Perplexity answer's citations before you rely on any of them
A follow-up prompt that re-checks every numbered citation in a prior Perplexity answer against the actual source text, catching claims attached to a citation that only loosely supports them.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Audit the accuracy of every citation in the answer below. This is a verification pass, not a rewrite — do not change or improve the original answer's wording. ORIGINAL QUESTION What drove Company X's revenue growth last quarter? ANSWER TO AUDIT (with its citation markers and links, unedited) "Company X's revenue grew 22% year over year [1], driven mainly by its enterprise segment [2]." with [1] and [2] linking to a Q2 earnings article and a separate product-launch blog post. FOR EACH CITED CLAIM 1. Open the actual source behind the citation marker. 2. State whether the source's own text directly supports the specific claim it is attached to, partially supports it, or does not support it at all. 3. If a citation supports a more general or a slightly different claim than the one it's attached to, say exactly what the gap is — do not mark it as supported just because it's topically related. 4. Flag any claim in the answer that has no citation attached at all. OUTPUT FORMAT A table: Claim | Citation # | Verdict (Supported / Partially Supported / Not Supported / Uncited) | What the source actually says. End with one overall line on whether this answer is safe to cite further without independent verification.
Customize the highlighted detailsoptional — the prompt above already works
Why this works
AI search tools have a known drift where a citation marker is attached to the correct general topic but not to the specific number or claim in that sentence — for example a growth percentage cited to an article that discusses the same company's growth but reports a different figure or period. Pasting the answer back in as a distinct verification task, rather than asking the same thread to double-check itself, narrows the job to something checkable: does this specific source text support this specific sentence, yes or no, rather than regenerating a fresh answer that could introduce new unverified claims. The instruction to flag partial support instead of a binary supported/not-supported catches the most common and most dangerous failure mode — a citation that is topically real but attached to a claim it doesn't actually make — which a looser audit would wave through as accurate simply because the link isn't broken.
What you get back
Claim: "revenue grew 22% year over year" | Citation 1 | Partially Supported | The earnings article reports 19% year-over-year growth for the quarter referenced, not 22% — the 22% figure appears to be a different metric (sequential growth) in the same article, likely conflated. Overall: not safe to cite further without checking the exact growth figure against the primary earnings release.
Verified against
Perplexity Pro Sonar Pro · 2026-07-12
Changelog
- 2026-07-12 — Initial publish, verified against Perplexity Pro Sonar Pro.
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