What Do LLM Judges Actually Verify? Matched Controls and Record Gaps for Document Currency
Unnati Shah, Samruddhi Kakade, Aum Patel
Abstract
LLM judges often check, against an amendment record, whether the documents an answer cites are still in force. Such records are rarely complete. From a table of replacements, our test generates matched answers citing a replaced document, its successor, the replaced document before its replacement, and an older document that a newer one updated without replacing; it removes links from the record and scores each finding by its stated reason. On 48 replacements from the IETF RFC index, judges given a correct record caught nearly every replaced citation, as a lookup would. On the 24 faults whose link we removed, every judge caught more from the texts alone than with the record: Gemini 3.1 Pro 23/24 against 1/24, GPT-5.5 23/24 against 9/24, Claude Opus 4.5 17/24 against 9/24 and Gemma 4 26B 13/24 against 0/24. The drop recurred on a second draw of removed links. Most misses carried no finding; in an exploratory run with a conflict code, only Gemini used it often. Rewording the gap as "no replacement recorded" did not help; presenting the record as an unverified note, or warning that it was incomplete, restored most lost catches for Gemini, GPT-5.5 and Claude (significant after correction for the first two) but at most 5 of 13 for Gemma; where catches returned, so did false alarms on updates. With both texts, judges mostly told replacements from updates; every update flagged had a near-identical title. A descriptive case study on Indian rooftop-solar rules is appended; we release the harness.