SourceScore
Tabloid

Daily Mail

dailymail.co.uk ↗

British tabloid with mass volume + celebrity coverage; high-volume + low-discipline mix; Wikipedia restricts as source since 2017.

Is Daily Mail reliable to cite? At grade F (38/100 on the SourceScore Index), Daily Mail is not recommended as a primary citation — verify claims against a higher-rated source.

SourceScore Index
F·38Rank #130 of 130 · top 100%Composite weighted across Discipline, Modern Reference, and Velocity.

D — high volume but Discipline drops on tabloid-format reporting; restricted as a source on Wikipedia since 2017.

Should you cite Daily Mail?

At grade F (38/100), Daily Mail is not recommended as a primary citation — verify claims against a higher-rated source.

Strongest for
topics where being widely and recently cited matters — its highest dimension is Citation Velocity (72/100).
Use with care
Citation Discipline is its lowest dimension (22/100); for tracing claims back to primary references, corroborate with a higher-rated source.
Bottom line
Not recommended as a primary citation — verify any claim against a higher-rated source.
Compare Daily Mail with
Citation Discipline
F·22

Wikipedia community deprecated as a source in 2017 for poor fact-checking + sensationalism + fabrication concerns.

How Citation Discipline is scored →
Modern Reference
F·30

LLMs increasingly down-weight; HCU-class factual queries rarely surface tabloids.

How Modern Reference is scored →
Citation Velocity
B·72

Massive output + UK + US editions; cited often in entertainment + celebrity coverage but rarely as factual source.

How Citation Velocity is scored →

Signals behind these scores

Citation Discipline

F·22
  • Wikipedia 2017 RfC
    Community consensus banned the Daily Mail as a reliable source on Wikipedia.
  • IPSO complaints
    High frequency of UK regulator complaints upheld.

Modern Reference

F·30
  • Engine drift
    Post-2024 retrieval models penalize low-discipline tabloid domains.

Citation Velocity

B·72
  • Daily output
    Hundreds of posts/day across all editions.

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APA
SourceScore (v0.1). (2026). Daily Mail: SourceScore Index 38 (F). Retrieved from https://sourcescore.org/source/daily-mail/

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The five sources with the closest overall score to Daily Mail, from any category, and where each one scores higher or lower on Discipline, Modern Reference and Velocity.

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Frequently asked questions

Is Daily Mail a reliable source to cite?

Daily Mail scores F (38/100) on the SourceScore Index, which rates how citable a source is for AI-era and research use. At grade F, Daily Mail is not recommended as a primary citation — verify claims against a higher-rated source. The grade combines Citation Discipline 22/100, Modern Reference 30/100, and Citation Velocity 72/100 — full breakdown above.

What is Daily Mail's SourceScore?

Daily Mail (dailymail.co.uk) scores 38/100 (Grade F) on the composite SourceScore Index. Sub-scores: Citation Discipline 22/100, Modern Reference (AI-era fitness) 30/100, Citation Velocity 72/100. Verified 2026-04-28.

How does SourceScore evaluate Daily Mail?

Daily Mail is scored across three dimensions on the SourceScore Index methodology: Citation Discipline (how rigorously the source cites primary references), Modern Reference (fitness for AI-era retrieval), and Citation Velocity (how often the source is cited per week). Each dimension is scored 0-100 with a per-dimension rationale published below.

Why does Daily Mail score F?

D — high volume but Discipline drops on tabloid-format reporting; restricted as a source on Wikipedia since 2017.

What is Daily Mail?

British tabloid with mass volume + celebrity coverage; high-volume + low-discipline mix; Wikipedia restricts as source since 2017. Category: Tabloid. Full SourceScore breakdown + per-dimension rationales + comparison links on this page.