“I read the criticism websites, then checked the Qur'an for myself, and everything I checked seemed to confirm what they said.”

What you did felt like verification, and the feeling was honest. Look at the sequence, though. The claims went in first, and the reading happened with them in hand. A conclusion carried into a text will be found in the text; that is what carrying it there does.

Here is a fair test of whether it was checking or confirming: for the objections that landed hardest, did you ever read the tradition's answer to them, in full, from the people who hold it? Nearly every argument on those sites is old, and the answers have been in print as long as the arguments have. If you never met the answers, the search was half a search, and half a search cannot confirm anything.

This is not a request to stop reading. It is a request to finish. Read the other shelf with the same seriousness you gave the first one, and then decide. The full rebuttal below walks through the method, and the rest of this site is the other shelf.