LLMs Cite Grokipedia: AI's New Content Sourcing Trend

None of the firms The Verge spoke to track citations for Anthropic's Claude, though several anecdotal reports on social media suggest the chatbot is also citing Grokipedia as a source. In many cases, AI tools appear to be citing Grokipedia to answer niche, obscure, or highly specific factual questions, as The Guardian reported late last week. Jim Yu, CEO of analytics firm BrightEdge, told The Verge that ChatGPT and AI Overviews use Grokipedia for largely "non-sensitive queries" like encyclopedic lookups and definitions, though differences are emerging in how much authority they afford it.

For AI Overviews, Grokipedia tends not to stand alone, Yu said, and "typically appears alongside several other sources" as "a supplementary reference rather than a primary source." When ChatGPT uses Grokipedia as a source, however, it gives it much more authority, Yu said, "often featuring it as one of the first sources cited for a query." Even for relatively mundane uses, experts warn using Grokipedia as a source risks spreading disinformation and promoting partisan talking points. Unlike Wikipedia, which is edited by humans in a transparent process, Grokipedia is produced by xAI's chatbot Grok.