Fact-checked · en español

Claims we've fact-checked about AI visibility

By Alejandro Ojeda · The AO Audit, Napa CA · August 24, 2026

The short version: AI-visibility advice repeats a lot of confident-sounding claims nobody traces to a source - including, once, us. Four of them below, checked against primary sources, with what's actually true instead of what's commonly repeated.

Claim: "ChatGPT's search results are pulled from SE Ranking's data"

False

The widely-cited 87% figure - how often ChatGPT search citations match Bing's top results - comes from a February 2025 Seer Interactive study, not from SE Ranking. We track this one closely because we cited it ourselves under the wrong name and had to correct our own attribution.

Claim: "Google uses over 200 ranking factors for local search"

Misleading

Google's own Business Profile documentation names exactly three local ranking factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. The "200+ factors" figure is third-party folklore, repeated so often it reads as fact - it isn't something Google has published.

Claim: "You register a business on Bing at bingplaces.com"

Outdated

bingplaces.com is dead. Bing moved business listings to bing.com/forbusiness in October 2025. Guides that still point to the old URL will send you to a dead page.

Claim: "Amazon's AI shopping assistant is called Rufus"

Outdated

Rufus was merged into "Alexa for Shopping" in May 2026. Content still referring to a standalone "Rufus" is describing a product that no longer exists under that name.

FAQ

Why does The AO Audit publish a fact-checking page?

Because AI-visibility advice is full of confidently-stated claims nobody traces back to a source, and we caught ourselves repeating one before we corrected it. This page exists so our own claims - and the common ones we hear from other sources - are checkable, not just asserted.

What does the rating scale mean?

1 means false. Higher numbers mean partially true, outdated, or misleading rather than flatly wrong - we say which in the text for each claim, since a single number can't carry that distinction on its own.

Will you add more claims to this page?

Yes, as we check new ones. Nothing here gets marked up unless we traced it to a primary source ourselves - we don't add a claim just because it sounds plausible.