Question 1

Is BSmeter a The Factual alternative?

Accepted Answer

Only partially, and it's worth being straight about why. The Factual scored text news articles on how credible they were likely to be, based on the author, the outlet, and the sourcing. BSmeter checks video and audio, and it rules on individual claims rather than scoring a whole piece. If you want a credibility grade on a written news article, BSmeter won't give you one — try Ground News or Media Bias/Fact Check. If the thing you're skeptical about is a video or podcast, BSmeter is built for exactly that and The Factual never was.

Question 2

Is The Factual still available?

Accepted Answer

Not as the standalone product it once was. Yahoo acquired The Factual in 2022 (the deal closed in August, announced that September) and its founders and team joined Yahoo News. thefactual.com now redirects to yahoo.com, and its Chrome extension was delisted in September 2025. The technology and the people went to Yahoo News rather than disappearing — but the independent site, extension, and newsletter you may remember are gone, which is why a lot of people end up searching for an alternative.

Question 3

Did The Factual actually fact-check claims?

Accepted Answer

No — and to its credit, it never pretended to. Its score came from four signals: site quality, author expertise, article tone or level of opinion, and the quality and diversity of cited sources. A well-sourced article by an expert scored highly whether or not any particular sentence in it was accurate. That was a reasonable design choice for scanning thousands of articles a day, but it does leave a real gap: nothing was verifying the claims themselves. That gap is the one BSmeter fills, for video and audio.