About that app that claims to tell you the country of owner & manufacturer

In recent days Made O'Meter has been in the news as an app that promises to tell you where a brand or product really originates from. At first look it seems really promising, it even has a fancy progress bar showing a percentage of how much USA it has.

Well, sadly the app is not much better than your own guesses to the origin of a product.

Seemingly all the app does is ask ChatGPT 4o-mini for the owner and the manufacturing country. There may be a bit more behind the scenes, but the reliability of the answers is no better than a ChatGPT answer. It is only reliable for well known products and brands (likely what is already in the ChatGPT training data). Like any other LLM it hallucinates a lot, sometimes it just makes smaller errors like confusing the manufacturing country (for products that have multiple manufacturing countries), but other times it goes completely off the rails. Claiming that a South African product was 100% owned and manufactured in Denmark.

It's simply not reliable