Fact-check an AI marketing draft before it ships
AI writes a launch email in ten seconds and can invent a stat just as fast. Five steps to catch made-up numbers, quotes, and links before a customer reads them.
Updated 2026-11-08 · Sources checked 2026-11-08 · The Loaded Tokens desk
Before you polish a single sentence, mark each number, date, quote, product name, comparison, and link in the draft. Those are the parts that can be wrong while sounding right. OpenAI's own help page lists made-up quotes, studies, citations, and sources as typical chatbot mistakes, and notes that a confident tone is not proof.
Paste the draft back in and ask for a source next to every highlighted claim, plus permission to say it doesn't know. Anthropic's guide to reducing made-up answers recommends exactly that: let the model admit uncertainty and have it cite a supporting quote, or drop the claim if it can't find one.
A citation is a lead, not a verdict. Click each link and find the sentence that supports the claim. If the page is missing, paywalled, or says something softer, rewrite the line or cut it. A pretty link to the wrong page is still the wrong page.
Check: Every highlighted claim has a page you opened and a sentence on it that says the same thing.
If a figure comes from the company selling the product, say so in the same sentence, as in 'the company says' or 'according to its own test.' Readers can weigh a vendor number fairly when they know where it came from. They can't if it reads like an independent result.
Have one teammate who didn't write the draft read only the claims and their sources. Fresh eyes catch the number that quietly changed somewhere between the third and fourth edit. Send nothing until that person signs off.
Questions
If the chatbot used web search, is the draft already fact-checked?
No. Search gives the model more current pages to draw from, and OpenAI's help page still tells users to verify important information and visit the links directly. Search improves the odds. It doesn't replace the check.
Can I ask the chatbot whether its own text is accurate?
You can ask it to find a supporting quote for each claim, which is useful. Treat its answer as a to-do list for your own check, not as the check itself.
Sources
Every product fact above comes from one of these pages. We did not run a separate test for this guide.