AI hallucination
A confident output that is unsupported, fabricated, or factually incorrect.
What is AI hallucination?
Hallucinations can affect product facts, pricing, company relationships, quotations, and citations. Brand monitoring should flag incorrect claims separately from negative sentiment because the remedy is different.
In practiceWhat does this look like in a real AI answer?
A model states that a product has a free plan even though the company has never offered one.
Why it matters for AI visibility
AI answers can shape awareness and buying decisions before a person visits a website. Understanding ai hallucination helps teams connect what a model says with the prompts, sources, and technical signals that influenced the result. The useful next step is to observe the evidence, compare it over time, and act on the specific gap.
How to measure or use it
- Define the scope. Choose the relevant market, prompts, models, locations, and time window.
- Keep the evidence. Save the complete answer, its citations, and the page or claim being evaluated.
- Compare patterns. Look for repeated movement across prompts and models instead of reacting to one response.
- Take a specific action. Improve the owned page, correct a claim, earn third-party inclusion, or create better evidence.