Why COUNTER doesn't have a chatbot... yet

“Tasha, why doesn’t countermetrics.org have a chatbot to answer questions about COUNTER? I’m sure AI can use all of the publicly available information that you already have, like the friendly guides, the Code, and the COUNTER API specification, to help people.”

I wish!

I’ve been testing new AI tools regularly over the last 18 months. So far, not one has consistently been able to deliver accurate information. My last set of tests were run in September 2025. One of the responses from Claude suggested that JSON and tabular reports from COUNTER-compliant publishers contain different information. That’s wrong – the report formats are different, but the contents are the same. A response from Gemini said that Database Reports in Release 5.1 include the old Release 4 Record_Views metric. Also wrong, neither Release 5 nor Release 5.1 use Record_views!

I’ve also tested agents that can be trained and embedded on our website, including zapier, jotform, zendesk and searchblox, as well as more general tools like perplexity, sierra, claude, and articulate. I would love for an AI tool to be able to reliably answer questions about COUNTER, and as soon as that becomes an option I’ll be planning how to make that happen.