From Dodes' book " research indicates that only 5 to 8 percent of the people who go to one or more AA meetings achieve sobriety for longer than one year."Point being, all of the effort I have gone to over the years to find accurate information about AA’s success and making the Wikipedia article on the topic reflect what science actually knows is paying off; people can no longer claim “AA has only a 5% success rate” without the claim being questioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_Alcoholics_Anonymous#The_Sober_Truth
But that number is controversial (and the above wikipedia article gives a good overview of the conflicting views).
The mid-2010s situation where a single doctor, without quoting any actual study, makes up a 5% success rate figure for AA by multiplying numbers from different studies together and not being questioned are behind us. Now, anyone interested in facts can and does find out that Dodes’s numbers were garbage.
AA has a 67-75% success rate among people who regularly go to meetings. This is the number that science shows us; this number has been replicated across multiple studies and has been consistent since the mid-1950s.