Scento, Europe's largest perfume decant website, has launched the Scento Perfume API, a free connector and REST API that gives AI assistants and developers note pyramids for more than 1,400 designer and niche perfumes. The launch accompanied a Scento study of 100 perfumes that found AI answer engines frequently add notes absent from official listings.
The API answers questions about perfumes, raw materials, houses, and families, with a saved source page for every entry. It is read-only, requires no account or key, and can be added in Claude through its connectors directory or as a custom connector, and in ChatGPT through developer mode with authentication set to none.
The design choice matters: by removing accounts and keys, Scento lowers the friction for AI assistants to ground perfume answers in its data rather than guessing. A free, open connector is a distribution strategy, not just a developer tool.
The accompanying study, which asked ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the same question about the top, heart, and base notes of each perfume on October 20, 2026, found that AI engines add notes not on the official list in a quarter to half of their answers. Gemini did so in 49 percent of answers, against 24 percent for ChatGPT and 25 percent for Perplexity.
ChatGPT returned every official note in 82 percent of answers, Perplexity in 78 percent, and Gemini in 69 percent. Designer perfumes were 22 to 32 percentage points more likely than niche perfumes to gain an unlisted note, depending on the engine. All three engines matched the official list exactly for 39 of the 99 perfumes they all answered.
Scento's move is a template for niche publishers facing AI inaccuracy in their vertical. Instead of only complaining that AI answers get their domain wrong, Scento shipped the structured data that lets AI answers get it right, and made that data free and easy to connect.
The payoff is citation and authority. When assistants ground perfume answers in Scento's data, Scento becomes the source for those answers, which drives visits, links, and brand authority in a category where AI inaccuracy was previously eroding trust in every answer, including accurate ones.
The API launch generalises beyond perfume. In any vertical where AI answers hallucinate specifics, such as ingredients, specifications, prices, or dates, the publisher with clean, structured, accessible data has an advantage over the publisher with only prose pages.
SEOs should ask which facts in their vertical AI answers get wrong, and whether a structured feed, API, or data page could fix them. Schema markup on pages is the lightweight version of the same strategy; a public API is the heavyweight version. Both make a site's facts easier for machines to use correctly.
Audit AI answers in your category for factual errors, and list the specific facts they get wrong. Then check whether your site already publishes those facts in a structured, machine-readable form, and whether an AI assistant could actually reach them.
If not, publish a structured data page or feed for the most error-prone facts, with sources, and make it discoverable. You do not need to build an API to benefit: a clean, well-marked data table with sources can become the page AI answers cite when they need that fact.
An API alone does not guarantee citation. Assistants choose sources based on relevance, freshness, authority, and accessibility, and a free API helps mainly with accessibility: it makes the data easy to fetch and easy to trust. The authority still comes from the publisher's reputation, the data's sourcing, and the coverage of other writers citing the same source.
Publishers copying Scento's playbook should therefore pair any structured data offering with the usual authority work: original research, press coverage, and links from respected sources in the vertical. The API makes the data usable; the authority makes it the data assistants choose.
Sources: EIN Presswire via WCIA, October 30, 2026.
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