ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews audited on mental health citations
A cross-platform audit tested ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview on 20 English mental-health questions plus queries in six additional languages, collecting 15,942 citations across 1,140 responses and 1,713 unique domains, per a preprint co-authored by Beth Israel Deaconess digital-psychiatry researcher John Torous and colleagues. The ten most-cited domains accounted for 43.6% of English-language citations, and government, commercial-health and academic sources each drew roughly 22% of citations overall — but the three platforms differed sharply in consistency and in which source types they favored. Non-English queries returned fewer citations and less language-appropriate routing, and explicitly asking a platform to show its sources produced only modest changes in what it cited.
Why it matters: It quantifies, for a sensitive topic, what a wire-record finding already suggested about health citations diverging by platform — now with a stated methodology and a 15,942-citation sample instead of a single vendor's dataset.
The record: ChatGPTPerplexityGoogle AI Overviews
Glossary: AI Overviews
Via arXiv AI-search citations ↗
Posted to the wire September 10, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.