An audit reports a third of Perplexity's numeric citations point at a page that does not carry the figure

Sources: primary, discussion
Summary: The audit checks whether a cited page contains a figure from the sentence the citation is attached to, and reports that 34.7 percent of numeric citations fail. The check is deterministic and reproducible with grep, needs no model judgment, and passes a citation when the page carries any single figure from the sentence, so the authors state the number is a floor. The report also publishes a model-judged secondary metric that is 26 points worse end to end, and it leads with the more generous deterministic figure, with the dataset released under CC BY 4.0.
Why it matters: A citation that resolves to a live page can still fail to carry the number attached to it, and the deterministic form of the check makes the reported rate a lower bound rather than an estimate.
Follow-up: Track whether the audit is rerun after any Perplexity change to its citation pipeline.