Near the end of the debate between New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon, his Democratic primary challenger, one of the moderators prefaced a question to Ms. Nixon by referencing her net worth. “Given your personal wealth, reported to be in the tens of millions of dollars — ” CBS anchorman Maurice DuBois started before Ms. Nixon interrupted: “ — which is not true.”

“It’s been reported,” he said.

“You can’t trust Google,” Ms. Nixon said, knowing everyone does.

The net worth of Cynthia Nixon, who would go on to lose that primary, has indeed been reported at $60 million. It’s been reported by the New York Observer, Washington Times, NYLON magazine, Bustle, the British tabloid The Sun and Newsweek. Perhaps most importantly, if you Google “Cynthia Nixon net worth,” the website displays “$60 million” in bold in a big featured box at the top of the page. (Alexa gives the same answer.) The source for the number on Google and in all the articles is a website called Celebrity Net Worth, and the source for the number on that site is “a proprietary algorithm.”

CelebrityNetWorth.com, and let’s call it CNW, was founded by Brian Warner in 2009 — not the same Brian Warner who performs under the name Marilyn Manson (Celebrity Net Worth: $25 million). The site’s home page is full of standard curiosity-gap clickbait in a celebrity finance flavor, with headlines like “Billionaire Michael Jordan Has Zero Influence On Which Players Wear His Shoes, And The Reason Why Is Kind Of Strange …” and “How Much Money Did Colonel Sanders Make Off Kentucky Fried Chicken? Not As Much As You’d Guess!” But CNW’s core product is the collection of pages it maintains for celebrities (of varying degrees of celebrity) with authoritatively phrased estimates as to how much money they have.

These pages include single paragraphs of biographical info, but they’re rendered practically unreadable by formatting. What readers are after is a single number, at the top of the page in big type: $20 million (Chris Pine), $40 million (Chris Pratt), $90 million (Chris Hemsworth). If you want to know how rich (or not) a celebrity is, CNW has an answer. No one is vouching for the veracity of that answer — CNW’s proprietors “expressly exclude liability for any such inaccuracies or errors to the fullest extent permitted by law,” according to the terms of use — but it's an answer nonetheless.