I am curious about the problem from the perspective of a startup idea / nonprofit website. What would you look for in an authoritative source that doesn't exist now? And which topics were you looking into?
For instance - ddg, google, doesn't really matter the search engine - typing in something like "ohtani batting average with runners in scoring position with 2 outs" used to be so easy it'd practically pop up in the quick answers with the exact link to the ESPN table or dudewhoneverleavesbasement.com that has tracked every baseball stat for the last 150 years.
Now you just get basically the same results for "ohtani batting average" or "ohtani news." It's impossibly frustrating. It's like that with everything now.
I guess that's more of a problem with search than anything else, but honestly, search is the main way people navigate the web. If I want anything authoritative, honestly, I'm probably going to wikipedia to see a source list and then checking out authors in the local library. Anything dated post 2022 I consider inherently unreliable.
That doesn't exactly solve the authoritative problem, but theoretically it makes it more centralized (one AI company vs. innumerable websites.)
On the other hand I’m not sure how the current state of the web is really any different. We just rely on Google or whatever search engine to “fact check.”
I think the small sites like that are either mostly gone or simply not ever indexed.
More recent data is not. Major League Baseball has wide open APIs that give you a huge amount of nearly real-time data, and runs a site where you can bulk download data. For personal, non-commercial purposes only. They will go after you for running a commercial service and demand licensing fees.
That's basically why everything polished is now behind a subscription, while you can DIY all you want.
But "authoritative" is a social construct.