Scento launches free perfume compendium as study finds AI adds unlisted notes

Scento says AI answer engines often add perfume notes that are not on official lists, with Gemini doing so in nearly half of responses in a study of 100 fragrances. The Paris-based retailer is responding with a free perfume compendium and connector that gives AI assistants structured note data for more than 750 perfumes.

Why it matters: - AI search and chat tools are becoming a first stop for fragrance research, but Scento's study suggests they can introduce notes that do not appear on a perfume's official pyramid. - That can distort how shoppers understand a scent before they buy, especially when the answer engine is used as a shortcut for product research. - Scento is trying to fix that gap with a free data connector that gives assistants structured perfume notes and links back to Scento pages.

What happened: - Scento studied 100 perfumes and asked ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same question about each fragrance's top, heart and base notes on Oct. 20, 2026. - Gemini added at least one unlisted note in 49% of answers, compared with 24% for ChatGPT and 25% for Perplexity. - ChatGPT returned every official note in 82% of its answers, Perplexity in 78% and Gemini in 69%. - Scento launched the Scento Perfume Compendium, a free connector for AI assistants with note pyramids for 750+ designer and niche perfumes.

The details: - The study compared each AI answer with the perfume's official list from the brand's own page or, for nine perfumes, from two authorized retailers that matched. - Answers about designer perfumes were 22 to 32 percentage points more likely than answers about niche perfumes to include a note not on the official list, depending on the engine. - All three engines matched the official list exactly for 39 of the 99 perfumes they all answered. - The study ran once, in English, from a US location. - Scento said a note missing from the official list is not automatically wrong. - The official lists came from the Compendium, which stores a saved source page for every entry. - The Compendium includes full top, heart and base notes for 750+ perfumes from 120+ houses. - It also explains 400+ raw materials, including orris and ambroxan. - The system maps each perfume to one of Scento's 14 scent families, from Sunlit Citrus to Oud Court. - Twelve read-only tools let an assistant draw a perfume portrait, compare two to four scents side by side, find perfumes built on a similar structure, introduce a house or raw material, match perfumes by shared materials, and build a small wardrobe or occasion edit. - Each answer includes a link to the matching Scento page in 10 languages.

Between the lines: - Scento is positioning structured fragrance data as a workaround for hallucination-prone scent descriptions in AI tools. - The launch also turns Scento's product catalog into a distribution layer for AI answer engines, not just a shopping site. - The focus on note pyramids, raw materials and scent families suggests Scento wants assistants to answer both consumer and technical fragrance questions.

What's next: - Scento says setup takes one address and needs no account or key. - In Claude, users add the connector under Settings and Connectors by pasting scento.com/mcp as a custom connector. - In ChatGPT, users add it in developer mode with authentication set to none. - The same connector works in Cursor, VS Code and other clients that support the Model Context Protocol over streamable HTTP. - Scento says the connector is listed in the Official MCP Registry and on Glama, mcp.so and MCP Market. - A matching REST interface and OpenAPI file are available for developers, and setup instructions are on the Scento developer page. - The Compendium is read-only and does not keep an account. - It answers questions about perfumes, raw materials, houses and families. - Scento's Chrome extension for perfume samples and prices has been available since February. - When a reader opens a perfume page on Fragrantica and Scento carries that scent, a small card shows the Scento sample price with one link to the perfume on scento.com. - The toolbar panel searches more than 1,000 designer and niche scents. - The extension needs no account and is available on the Chrome Web Store. - Versions for Firefox, Opera, Safari and Edge are planned, including Firefox for Android and Safari on iPhone.

The bottom line: - Scento is betting that cleaner fragrance data will make AI answers more reliable and keep shoppers closer to its own catalog.