AI Hallucination
An AI hallucination is an answer from an AI tool that sounds sure of itself but isn't true. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, calls hallucinations plausible but false statements and says ChatGPT has them too. Its research argues they happen partly because AI is graded in ways that reward guessing over saying it doesn't know.
Source: OpenAI, Why language models hallucinate (September 5, 2025), checked October 29, 2026
What AI Hallucination means for your business
For a business, a hallucination might be a wrong price, old hours, a service you don't offer, or another company's details mixed into yours. We can't stop an AI tool from guessing, so we'd make the right answer plain and easy to find.
OpenAI says ChatGPT may search the web when a question would benefit from current information. Its help page also warns that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. So we'd put your hours, prices, service area and what you do in plain sentences on your own site, and make your listings and profiles say the same thing.
Hallucination mitigation is the name for the work of cutting these errors down. Cutting errors on the AI side is the builders' job. On your side, we'd ask the questions your buyers ask, note every wrong fact, and trace each one back to the page or listing it most likely came from.
If ChatGPT keeps giving out the wrong facts about you, rewriting your pages so the right facts are easy to quote is where we'd start.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia, IBM, Google Cloud, Stanford and tech blogs, and said AI tools don't look facts up the way a search engine does, with no mention of web search. ChatGPT gave a plain definition and cited no sources.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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