B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
1%
1% -- hallucination rate for AI search engines (2026)
Hallucination rates in everyday queries sit near 1% to 1.5%.
- Reported as a range of 1% to 1.5% for everyday queries
- Can climb toward 30% on deep-research tasks
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
·
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
1%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
50
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
Brad Wetherall / Esquire Digital
Primary
Tier C
https://www.alchemycrew.ventures/blog/brad-wetherall-ai-search-playbook ↗
Source Article
Number One on Google No Longer Wins: Brad Wetherall's AI Search
Original Research
Brad Wetherall / Esquire Digital
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Range 1%-1.5% for everyday queries; up to 30% on deep-research tasks; midpoint extracted
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI search engines: 1% hallucination rate. Source: Brad Wetherall / Esquire Digital (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-hallucination-rate-queries
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-hallucination-rate-queries" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>1%</strong> -- hallucination rate for AI search engines<br><small>Source: Brad Wetherall / Esquire Digital (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-hallucination-rate-queries" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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