Hallucinations about your brand
Also known as: AI misinformation, confabulation
When an assistant states something confidently wrong about you — a price you do not charge, a service you do not offer, a location you have never had.
Last revised 2026-09-07. Also available as markdown — request this URL with Accept: text/markdown.
In plain English
Language models produce fluent text whether or not they have the facts, so gaps get filled with plausible invention. About brands this is often specific and damaging: a wrong price, an imagined refund policy, a competitor's feature attributed to you, a closed office still being recommended.
It is rarely malice and never a database entry someone can go and correct. It is what happens when the assistant cannot find a clear source and reaches for the shape of an answer instead.
How to fix / set it up
- Find what is actually being said: ask each engine the questions a customer would, several times, and record the answers.
- Publish the disputed fact as plain dated text on a canonical page — pricing on the pricing page, coverage on the coverage page.
- Remove or clearly date the stale pages that contradict it.
- Re-sample after a few weeks. Retrieval indexes update on their own schedule and the change is not instant.
The technical detail
The reliable fix is supply, not complaint. Grounded answers prefer retrievable text: if the correct price sits in unambiguous prose on a crawlable page, the invented one loses its opening. Facts hidden in images, PDFs or JavaScript-rendered widgets leave exactly the vacuum that gets filled.
Ambiguity invites error. Two pages giving different prices with no dates, or an old announcement that still reads as current, are worse than one clearly dated statement.
Some engines accept feedback on a specific answer and most large ones have a route for factual corrections about an organisation. Treat it as slow and partial; the durable remedy is that the correct fact is easier to retrieve than the wrong one.
FAQ
Can I make an AI retract something?
Not directly and not on demand. You can change what it retrieves, which is the mechanism that actually governs the answer.
Is a disclaimer page enough?
No. A page saying "contrary to reports we do not offer X" often reinforces the association. State what is true, plainly, where the fact belongs.