Curated retrieval versus open web search in public AI information services: a coverage-trust trade-off
Public institutions increasingly use large language models (LLMs) to answer citizens' questions, often pairing a curated knowledge base with live web search, yet whether the sources behind these answers can be trusted has received little empirical scrutiny. We report a pre-launch expert evaluation of Evrópuvefur, an independent, government-funded service run by the University of Iceland that answers questions about the European Union, conducted as Iceland prepared for its referendum of 29 August 2026 on whether to resume EU accession talks. Five domain experts produced 551 evaluations of 449 A
