It was their baptism of fire. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overview achieved a near-faultless performance in the US presidential election. This was the first major election since the breakthrough of conversational assistantsnow being adopted by the general public. At a time when the disinformation alert was at its height, these artificial intelligence-based services were eagerly awaited.

In the run-up to the election, most of their developers played it safe. Google was at the forefront with its search engine and generative AI tools (Gemini, AI Overview…). The Mountain View giant chose to redirect its American users questioning it about the presidential election to recognized sources of information, such as the American news agency The Associated Press (AP). And when they had questions about the electoral process, such as how to register to vote or the location of polling stations…