AI answers on brand questions are 96% accurate, but platforms skip 31% of prompts
Seer Interactive tracked 1,562 branded prompts about its own company across six AI platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode — generating 28,123 responses, and found platforms declined to answer entirely 31.2% of the time versus giving an inaccurate answer just 2.8% of the time. Accuracy on comparative prompts was far weaker: platforms declined 80.3% of those and were right only 18.8% of the time they did answer. AI Mode posted the highest total accuracy at 74.2%, while Claude had the highest accuracy of any platform when it answered (98%) but the lowest total accuracy (52.6%) because it declined most often. The study covers a single brand — Seer’s own — not a cross-brand sample.
Why it matters: It complicates the hallucination narrative — across this sample, most AI unreliability on brand facts was platforms declining to answer rather than answering wrong, and the platform quickest to decline was also the most careful when it didn't.
The record: AnthropicChatGPTGoogle AI Mode
Glossary: AI OverviewsAI Mode
Posted to the wire August 27, 2026.