If you can’t trust your panel, why trust the data?

Your survey panel isn’t your customer. It’s a professional respondent.

Survey slop

Surveys are seductive. They look fast, scalable and safe.

But who’s actually filling them in?

More often than not, it’s the same pool of people who always answer surveys. The professional respondents. People who know how to game the screener. People who can fly through twenty questions for the promise of a reward.

Panels promise customers. What you get is respondents.

The mess behind clean numbers

The warning signs are everywhere; every question answered with the same option, just to get through faster, or contradictory answers in the same survey.

Reports show AI is already compromising survey integrity at scale and as one recent paper warns, emerging AI‑generated responses may soon be impossible to detect with traditional checks.

The same data gets disguised by a summary that looks clean.

But the source? Messy. Skewed. Often nothing like your real audience.

Those ghost numbers don’t stay in the spreadsheet. They get added straight into strategy decks. They drive product roadmaps, campaigns, loyalty schemes. Budgets follow.

All built on bad actors, or bots.

The consequences

Bad input means bad strategy.

• Teams end up optimising for behaviours that don’t exist.

• Campaigns get designed for people who never show up.

• Millions are spent chasing ghosts.

AI is accelerating the risk. Anyone can spin up a survey in seconds now. But the findings are only as good as the person on the other side of the screen.

The danger isn’t just wasted effort. It’s false confidence. Numbers dressed up as truth.

The alternative

The most dangerous consequence of bad research is false confidence.

Surveys aren’t useless. But speed and simplicity fuel the most dangerous mindset in business: something is better than nothing.

It isn’t.

A handful of real conversations beats a thousand junk surveys. Guerrilla research in the field often gets you to clarity faster.

• Talk to real customers.

• Watch how they really behave.

• Listen to the contradictions, the sighs, the workarounds.

• That’s where the truth lives.

Conclusion

Panels give you numbers that look legitimate. But legitimacy isn’t the same as reality.

If can’t trust your panel, why would you trust them to shape your strategy?

At Somewhen, we don’t chase ghosts. We get closer to the people who actually buy, click, and care. Because when you’re face-to-face with your customers, strategy stops being hypothetical — it starts being human.