Over half of us now use AI to search the web, yet the stubbornly low data accuracy of common tools creates new business risks.
While generative AI (GenAI) offers undeniable efficiency gains, a new investigation highlights a disparity between user trust and technical accuracy that poses specific risks to corporate compliance, legal standing, and financial planning.
For the C-suite, the adoption of these tools represents a classic ‘shadow IT’ challenge. According to a survey of 4,189 UK adults conducted in September 2025, around a third of users believe AI is already more important to them than standard web searching. If employees trust these tools for personal queries, they are almost certainly employing them for business research.
The investigation, conducted by Which?, suggests that unverified reliance on these platforms could be costly. Around half of AI users report trusting the information they receive to a ‘reasonable’ or ‘great’ extent. Yet, looking at the granularity of the responses provided by AI models, that trust is often misplaced.
The accuracy gap when using AI to search the web
The study tested six major tools – ChatGPT, Google Gemini (both standard and ‘AI Overviews’), Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, and Perplexity – across 40 common questions spanning finance, law, and consumer rights.
Perplexity achieved the highest total score at 71 percent, closely followed by Google Gemini AI Overviews at 70 percent. In contrast, Meta scored the lowest at 55 percent. ChatGPT, despite its widespread adoption, received a total score of 64 percent, making it the second-lowest performer among the tools tested. This disconnect between market dominance and reliable output underlines the danger of assuming popularity equals performance in the GenAI space.
However, the investigation revealed that all of these AI tools frequently misread information or provided incomplete advice that could pose serious business risks. For financial officers and legal departments, the nature of these errors is particularly concerning.
When asked how to invest a £25,000 annual ISA allowance, both ChatGPT and Copilot failed to identify a deliberate error in the prompt regarding the statutory limit. Instead of correcting the figure, they offered advice that potentially risked breaching HMRC rules.
While Gemini, Meta, and Perplexity successfully identified the error, the inconsistency across platforms necessitates a rigorous “human-in-the-loop” protocol for any business process involving AI to ensure accuracy.
For legal teams, the tendency of AI to generalise regional regulations when using it for web search presents a distinct business risk. The testing found it common for tools to misunderstand that legal statutes often differ between UK regions, such as Scotland versus England and Wales.
Furthermore, the investigation highlighted an ethical gap in how these models handle high-stakes queries. On legal and financial matters, the tools infrequently advised…
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