How to fact-check an AI assistant's answers in five minutes
Every assistant in our rankings got facts wrong during testing. Some errors were small, like a date off by a year. Others were confident and completely invented, such as a court ruling that never happened. None of the six is safe to quote without a check. The good news is that checking rarely takes more than five minutes once you have a routine.
Why assistants get things wrong
A chat assistant writes the most likely next words based on patterns in its training data. It doesn't look facts up unless it has a search tool switched on, and even then it can misread a page. That is why answers sound equally sure whether they are right or wrong. Tone tells you nothing; only the source does.
Assistants without web search are the riskiest for anything recent. 
Pi doesn't say whether it searches the web, and on Poe it depends on which bot you pick. If an answer touches on something from the past year, assume it needs a check.
Errors cluster in a few places: recent events, exact numbers, quotes, legal and tax rules, and anything specific to one province.
Ask for sources, then open them
Assistants with web search can show links: 
ChatGPT lists Search in its plan comparison, 
DeepSeek has a Search mode, and 
Grok cites web pages and posts on X. Ask for links whenever an answer will drive a decision.
Then open each link and find the sentence that supports the claim. In our tests, cited pages sometimes said something different, or nothing at all, about the point in question. A link that exists is not the same as a link that agrees.
Check numbers and dates on their own
Copy every figure into a list: prices, percentages, deadlines, limits. Check each one separately against the original source. Pay special attention to currency. Several providers in our rankings show prices in "$" without saying which dollar, and an assistant may happily convert or round them for you.
For dates, ask yourself whether the answer could be out of date. Tax brackets, benefit amounts and contribution limits change every year.
Confirm Canadian rules at the source
Assistants trained mostly on American text often slip US rules into answers about Canada. For anything about taxes, benefits, immigration or consumer rights, confirm the answer on canada.ca or on your provincial government's site. For a law, read the section itself rather than a summary.
Quebec readers should be extra careful: civil law rules there differ from the other provinces, and many answers ignore that.
Use a second model as a cross-check
Asking a different assistant the same question is a quick way to find weak spots. If two answers disagree, at least one is wrong, and you know where to dig. 
Poe makes this easy because one account reaches several models. Agreement between two assistants is still not proof, though, since they may share the same mistaken source. Treat a match as a reason to keep going, and treat a clash as a red flag worth ten minutes of reading.
A five-minute checklist
- Mark every claim you plan to rely on: names, numbers, dates, rules.
- Ask the assistant for a source for each one.
- Open each source and find the exact supporting sentence.
- Check Canadian rules on canada.ca or a provincial government site.
- Ask a second assistant the same question and compare.
If a claim fails any step, drop it or replace it with what the source says.
When to skip the assistant entirely
For medical symptoms, legal disputes and money decisions with real stakes, an assistant can help you prepare questions, but the answer should come from a doctor, a lawyer or a licensed adviser. Nothing on our site is legal, medical or financial advice, and the same goes for the assistants we review.
Next, read our guide to writing better prompts, which shows how to ask for assumptions up front.