With trust in traditional news media at historic lows and the spread of online misinformation and disinformation now viewed as a significant global threat, tools that can automatically verify factual statements — and do so in a transparent, reproducible way — are increasingly important. Using a test set with known answers, or a “benchmark,” provides a standardized way to quantify and compare the performance of different systems, advancing the science of automatic fact-checking. AVeriTeC (Automated Verification of Textual Claims) is an EU-funded research benchmark built from real-world claims checked by professional fact-checking organizations, and is directly relevant to Crickit, a patent-pending technology publicly released in November 2025 that provides real-time fact-checking overlays for social-media videos, starting with YouTube on desktop browsers.
