Stop reading the site itself. Open new tabs and see what others say about it. A Stanford study found this beat historians and students.
By FactInfoLive · Published 2026-11-12 · Updated 2026-11-12
The short answer
Lateral reading means leaving an unfamiliar website quickly and opening new browser tabs to find out who is behind it and what other sources say about it, instead of judging it only by how it looks or what its own "About" page claims.
What the Stanford study found
In 2017, Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew of the Stanford History Education Group studied how 45 people judged live websites: 10 historians with PhDs, 10 professional fact-checkers and 25 Stanford undergraduates. According to the paper's summary, historians and students often fell for easy-to-fake features such as official-looking logos and domain names and read "vertically", staying on the site. The fact-checkers read laterally, left the site after a quick look, and reached more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time.
One task asked participants to compare two websites about bullying: one from the American Academy of Pediatrics and one from the American College of Pediatricians. A university library guide that summarises the study reports that all of the fact-checkers identified the reliable site, compared with half of the historians and 20 percent of the undergraduates. The researchers suggest the fact-checkers succeeded because they searched for information about each group elsewhere instead of staying on its pages.
How to do it in 3 steps
1. Get your bearings first. Before reading a page closely, open a new tab and search for the name of the site or organization.
2. Read what other trusted sources say about it. One teaching guide suggests checking several independent sources and then deciding whether the original is trustworthy.
3. Go back and read with context. Only after you know who is behind it and how others describe it, return to the article and judge its claims.
Another habit: click restraint
A Stanford curriculum also teaches "click restraint": do not just click the first search result. Scan several results before deciding which to open.
Limits
Lateral reading tells you about a source's reputation and who is behind it. It does not prove that a particular claim is true. For that, look for the original evidence the claim rests on.
Sources
Wineburg, S. and McGrew, S., "Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information" (Stanford History Education Group, 2017): https://ssrn.com/abstract=3048994
Social Science Research Council summary of the same paper: https://mediawell.ssrc.org/citations/lateral-reading-reading-less-and-learning-more-when-evaluating-digital-information/
Indiana University library guide, web evaluation skills (summarises the study results): https://iu.pressbooks.pub/infolit/?p=134
University of Iowa open textbook, "Evaluating Online Information: Lateral Reading": https://pressbooks.uiowa.edu/ssresearchmethodscommunicationonline/chapter/evaluating-online-information-lateral-reading/
EdSource on the Stanford curriculum and click restraint: https://edsource.org/terms/stanford-history-education-group