Respondent Quality vs Response Quality
Most survey fraud tools only score the person. Maxna scores the person and the answers with proprietary AI - that is the difference between respondent quality and sample integrity.
Most survey fraud software is a respondent quality product. It asks: is this a real, unique, in-market person?
That question is necessary. It is no longer sufficient.
Response quality asks a second question: are the answers usable research, or did a model (or a bored professional) write them?
Maxna is built as both. That is the difference between a fingerprint and sample integrity.
What respondent quality covers
- Device and environment risk
- Bots and automation
- Click farms and coordinated labor
- VPN / proxy and geo mismatch
- Duplicates and professional respondents
This is the stack identity and “data quality score” vendors already sell. Maxna includes it. See respondent fraud detection.
What response quality covers
- AI-written open-ends
- Low-effort and copy-paste text
- Generic fluency with no lived detail
- Inconsistency across the interview
This is proprietary AI, not a device ID. A clean phone can still paste ChatGPT. Respondent-only tools green-light that session.
Why the split matters in 2026
If you only buy respondent quality, your QC story is “we blocked fake people.” Your coding file can still be synthetic. Stakeholders quote a paragraph that never happened. Trackers drift for reasons that look like brand movement.
If you only buy a verbatim classifier, you will over-flag fluent humans and miss farms that never type much.
The gate has to fuse both. Maxna’s outer shell and behavior layers handle the person. Deep quarantine grades the text. Ops sees which layer failed.
How to evaluate vendors
Ask:
- Do you score the respondent, the response, or both?
- Can I see an AI / open-end reason separately from a bot reason?
- Do you sell sample, or are you infrastructure in front of mine?
If the answer to (1) is only the person, you are buying 2016. CloudResearch Sentry is the expensive version of that: extra questions plus a fingerprint. Read The State of Survey Fraud 2026 and the comparisons.
Talk to Maxna if you want both layers on the next wave.