Aggregators are useful for the same reason phone books were useful: they tell you where to look. They stop being useful the moment a reader treats a returned row as evidence of what is there. The aggregator's timestamp refers to its own pull, not the underlying record's reality, and the gap between the two is where every quietly wrong report in this industry actually lives.
The first shape is stale data presented as fresh. Aggregators rarely surface the age of each field. A company status flagged as active in the aggregator might be six months out of date because the upstream pull cycle for that country runs twice a year. A person's address might be ten years old. The aggregator's last-updated timestamp refers to its own pull, not the underlying record's reality.
The second shape is silent enrichment; some aggregators infer fields. They will fill in an industry classification, a beneficial owner, a parent entity, based on internal logic that is not surfaced and not traceable. A finding built on an inferred field is a finding built on the aggregator's opinion, which is fine if you know that, and a serious problem if you don't.
The third shape is identity collapse; aggregators love to merge records. They merge two companies they think are the same. They merge two people they think are the same. When the merge is wrong, the merged record carries fields from both, and the aggregator does not show its work.
We treat aggregator results as a map of where to look, not as evidence of what is there. Every finding that ends up in a reports is verified against the original source. The aggregator gets us to the door faster. It does not get to write the report.