Raising the bar on data quality

Data quality has always been fundamental to good research. But for too long, the industry has treated it as a solved problem, relying on established methodologies in a threat landscape that has changed dramatically around them. 

Fraudsters have become more sophistocated, using new technologies to generate convincing fake responses at a scale that was simply not possible before. At Attest, we’ve spent considerable time and resource building quality systems fit for this new reality, and that commitment now has formal, external validation behind it.

We’re proud to announce that Attest has signed the Global Data Quality (GDQ) Data Quality Excellence Pledge, joining a growing coalition of more than 250 research organisations committed to upholding the highest standards of data integrity across the industry.

This is the culmination of months of work and a reflection of where we’ve always stood on data quality, and on what we want to strive to achieve for the future, both for Attest and for the wider research and insights industry.

What the GDQ Pledge actually means

The GDQ initiative was established to create meaningful, verifiable quality signals for buyers of market research, moving the industry beyond self-certification and towards shared, enforceable standards.

Signing the Pledge signals a formal commitment to rigorous quality standards. It confirms how we verify participant identity and consent, the transparency with which we communicate our sampling methodology and quality metrics, how we protect participant rights and comply with privacy regulations, and how we contribute to elevating industry standards over time. The Pledge is a formal commitment, independently reviewed, and subject to renewal, with potential for recognition to be withdrawn if standards aren’t maintained.

For Attest, it’s also an alignment with something we’ve already been building toward, and that formalises and externally validates practices we’ve spent years developing. Overall, it gives our customers concrete, independently verified reassurance of the quality of our data and research practices.

Why this matters now

The research industry is navigating a genuinely difficult moment. Fraud and low-quality survey responses are proliferating, and advances in AI have dramatically raised the bar for what a “convincing” fake response looks like. What was once difficult to fake at scale has become alarmingly easy.

Recent headlines, including concerns raised around data quality at some of the industry’s most established names, have brought this issue into sharp relief. But the problem predates any single news story, and it won’t be solved by reacting to individual incidents. It requires structural investment in better systems, better detection, and better transparency.

That’s the context in which the GDQ Pledge carries real weight, distinguishing organisations that have made a proactive, documented, accountable commitment to quality from those that haven’t.

Data quality is the very foundation of Attest’s business

Signing the Pledge reflects how we already operate:

Advanced IP and device monitoring. We track IP addresses and device usage patterns to flag suspicious behaviour before it can contaminate a dataset, identifying anomalies that would be invisible to less rigorous systems.

Proprietary data quality checks. We build our own LLM data checks alongside machine learning and traditional rule-based logic so we can constantly evolve our quality practices to stay ahead of bad actors.   

Leveraging longitudinal respondent tracking. Rather than evaluating responses in isolation,respondent behaviour is monitored over time. Patterns that appear unremarkable within a single survey can become significant signals when viewed across a broader history.

A multi-panel approach with built-in resilience. Our model draws on hundreds of supply partners rather than relying on any single supplier. This gives us the reach to represent genuinely diverse audiences without ever trading that reach against quality. We can reject low-quality responses, remove underperforming panels, and continuously rebalance our sources.

End-to-end visibility. Our infrastructure is designed to identify bad actors wherever they enter the system, giving us greater control and greater confidence in the data we deliver to customers.

Human review and oversight. Our Ops team manually reviews open-ended responses, carrying out quality spot-checks on quantitative data as fieldwork runs.

The team behind the technology

Staying ahead of a fast-moving threat requires the right technical leadership, which is why we recently appointed Asitha Rodrigo as Chief Technology Officer. Asitha brings 14 years’ experience as CTO across highly regulated technology businesses including defaqto, Revoo, SAPI and Seedrs. His appointment reflects our ongoing priorities: deep investment in platform integrity, more sophisticated application of AI, and a commitment to building technology that researchers can genuinely trust.

The market is rightly wary of “black box” AI systems that generate results without transparency, traceability or accountability. Our approach is the opposite. Every AI capability we develop or adopt is held to the same standard as everything else we do. It must make the data more reliable, not introduce new risk, and that’s the lens through which Asitha and the team will be building.

The integrity of Attest’s underlying technology stack is our ongoing priority; we want our AI capabilities to be both generative, and to be able to detect fraudulent responses.

Trust proven by actions rather than words

Trust in research should be judged on the strength and adaptability of the safeguards that companies have built, and on how those safeguards continue to evolve as the threat landscape changes.

The companies that will earn and keep the trust of their customers are not those that simply react to problems when they surface, but those that invest consistently and proactively in the infrastructure to prevent those problems from arising in the first place.

The GDQ Data Quality Excellence Pledge is one part of how we prove that Attest is doing exactly that.