What's New: 100% Human Guarantee, significant pool growth, and more
This month, we're making our boldest promise around our data quality, growing our participant network at record pace and shipping more tools to make data collection faster and more powerful.
Keep reading to see how April’s updates uplift your research.
Introducing the 100% Human Guarantee
We've always been confident in how we verify Prolific participant identity and quality. Before participants even see a single study, they’ve undergone 50+ checks, including ID verification, bot and AI detection, attention, comprehension, and more.
Now we're putting money behind that confidence.
If any participant in your study is flagged as an AI agent, we'll give you twice your money back for that participant, within 21 days of the submission being flagged - no need to claim.
To qualify, set up your study using Qualtrics and Prolific together, and enable Bot authenticity checks. These checks use real-time behavioural analysis throughout your study to detect automated scripts or AI agents, with 100% accuracy in testing.
The guarantee is live now, every qualifying study is automatically covered. Learn more.
Find out how Prolific’s data quality compares to 10 other platforms
Read the largest head-to-head comparison of online survey platforms ever conducted. It benchmarks data quality, AI agent presence, and cost efficiency across providers using a standardised methodology.
Recruiting 5,200 participants across 13 different online panels (direct/proprietary, hybrid and marketplace), the study proves that fears about AI agents polluting research data are overblown, and where you recruit matters far more. Key insights include:
- Fears about AI agents invalidating survey research are largely overstated, with negligible contamination observed across most contemporary platforms
- The real systemic risk to data integrity lies in the quality of human participants and platform design, not in widespread, undetected AI infiltration
- Hybrid and marketplace platforms deliver significantly lower-quality data, making them far more expensive per usable respondent, despite lower upfront costs
Follow the health of your participant groups with confidence
We’re revamping our Participant Group Hub to make it easier to assess group health and quality for longitudinal and repeat evaluation programmes. Now, you feel confident your participant groups are ready for your next study.
You’ll start noticing improvements already, kicking off in the UI with a refreshed design, enriched participant data (including last active date and status), search, CSV upload and bulk management tooling. Watch this space for more updates in both the UI and API over the coming months.
Growing our participant network faster than ever
Our overall pool is up 21.7% compared to last quarter, with over 245,000 90 day active participants on the platform.
- Verified experts are our fastest-growing segment - up 50% quarter-on-quarter, with standout increases in finance, legal, and languages.
- Over 13,000 participants with quality-assured AI evaluation expertise, assessed via our AI assessment.
- Regional expansion with five new countries including the UAE and Singapore, as well as strong regional growth in Spain, France and Mexico.
Need to check if your target audience is on Prolific? Use our Audience Finder.
Smarter study setup
A handful of quality-of-life improvements this month:
- Boosting uptake for camera, microphone, and software download studies: Studies with these requirements now only show to participants who’ve pre-selected interest in receiving them. This gives a more accurate view of your eligible pool, and hopes to improve fill times by better matching studies with participant preferences.
- Workspace name character limit increased: Workspace names now support up to 25 characters, up from 18.
- Help for rate limits or slow API response times: Review our new best practice Managing High Loads section, now available in our API docs
- Search for studies within projects: You can now use a search bar to quickly find studies within your projects.
- More control over your email notifications: New toggles found under ‘Preferences’ let you mute notifications for participant messages and study status changes independently. If you still want product updates like this one, keep the 'New features & product updates' toggle on.
- More flexibility when cloning studies: When duplicating a study, you can now choose whether to block or allow participants from the original study to take the duplicate.
Must-attend events in April
This month we’ll be attending the biggest events in Research and AI:
6-9 April: HumanX, San Francisco
Find our team at Booth #410 and post a photo, tag us, and answer one of our questions to win premium swag or be entered into a prize draw!
13-17 April: CHI, Barcelona
Connect with Simon Jones (Lead Research Consultant) at ACM CHI 26, the leading conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
14-16 April: Digital Universities UK
Focussing on scaling innovation and strategic technology adoption at this year’s Digital Universities UK, meet Matt Pilling (Customer Success Manager) to learn how Prolific can accelerate your research.
23-27 April: ICLR, Brazil
Meet us at Booth #206 and discover how we design, deliver and scale AI evaluation for frontier AI, and explore HUMAINE – our public leaderboard for assessing model behaviour in natural, human conditions, published at ICLR. Book a slot here.
29 April-2 May: SIOP, New Orleans
Lorna Evans (Customer Success Manager) is heading to SIOP’s Annual Conference in New Orleans, the leading event in industrial-organisational psychology, reach out to her if you’re attending.
