Refract vs Ground News: what's actually different
Last updated 17 September 2026
If you've looked into media bias tools before, you've probably come across Ground News. It's a genuinely useful product with a large following, and it's worth being upfront about what it does well before getting into where Refract takes a different approach.
What Ground News actually does
Ground News rates news outlets, not individual articles. Every publication in its database carries a bias and factuality score, pulled from three independent monitoring organisations — AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, and Media Bias/Fact Check — then averaged together. When you read a story, you're seeing where the outlet generally sits, not an assessment of that specific piece of writing.
Its standout feature is Blindspot — a feed that surfaces stories getting lopsided coverage, heavily reported by outlets on one side of the political spectrum and largely ignored by the other. That's a genuinely useful lens on the news, and it's not something Refract does. If you want to see what the "other side" isn't talking about this week, Ground News does that well.
Worth knowing directly from their own materials: Ground News doesn't fact-check individual articles. Their own explanation is that real-time fact-checking at scale is difficult to do — which is a fair, honest limitation to state plainly, and it's the single clearest point of difference from what Refract is built to do.
What Refract does differently
Refract analyses the specific article you're reading, live, every time — not a pre-existing score for the outlet in general. Three AI models (Claude, GPT-4 and Gemini) independently assess that one piece for bias, purpose, funding transparency and source credibility, and Refract shows you not just the average score but whether the three models actually agree.
The bigger structural difference is Deep Verify. Refract pulls out the specific factual claims made in an article and checks each one against a real primary source — a government dataset, a court record, an official report — rather than scoring the outlet's general reputation. This is exactly the kind of per-article fact-checking Ground News says isn't practical to do live at scale. Whether it's fully solved or not is a fair question, but it's the thing Refract is deliberately built to attempt.
The honest trade-offs
Neither approach is strictly "better" — they answer different questions.
Ground News is stronger if you want to:
- See how a story's coverage differs across the political spectrum
- Spot when a story is being ignored by one side entirely
- Get a general reputation score for outlets you don't already know well
Refract is stronger if you want to:
- Know whether this specific article holds up factually, not just whether the outlet generally does
- Check a claim against a real primary source, not an outlet's aggregate reputation
- See genuine AI disagreement flagged, rather than a single blended score with no visibility into how contested it is
Pricing
Ground News's full-featured plan runs at $99.99/year (about $8.33/month). Refract starts free — 10 credits a month — with paid plans from £4/month, and every plan includes both Quick Scan and Deep Verify rather than gating fact-level detail behind a separate tier.
Where they'd genuinely work well together
If you want the full picture: Ground News for spotting what's being covered and by whom, Refract for checking whether the specific thing you're reading right now actually holds up. They're solving adjacent problems, not identical ones.