Guides
When AIs make up information about your company
Ask an AI to describe your company: it will always answer, confidently, within seconds. The problem is that it answers with the same confidence when it is wrong. We have seen AIs attribute to a company an activity it never had, invent complete price lists and cite imaginary founders — all phrased as plain facts.
Why AIs make things up
A generative AI does not consult an official record: it produces the most plausible sequence of words based on what it has read. When reliable sources about your company are scarce or ambiguous, the model fills the gaps with something plausible. A company name that evokes artificial intelligence will be credited with AI auditing services; a workshop with a poetic name becomes a fashion brand.
It is not malice, it is statistics. But for the prospect asking the question, an invented answer looks exactly like an accurate one.
The real damage
Invented prices frame the negotiation before your first contact: if the AI quotes a range twice yours, prospects walk away without ever talking to you. A wrong activity makes you show up in the wrong searches and vanish from the right ones. And false information spreads: an AI that invents sometimes feeds on another's text, and the error hardens from answer to answer.
There is a quieter variant: invented web addresses. AIs sometimes cite pages of your website that never existed. Real visitors click, land on an error page, and leave. If your statistics show visits to unknown addresses, that is often the trace of an AI inventing your links.
How to detect inventions
Ask several AIs directly about your brand — "what do you know about [your company]?" — and check every factual claim: activity, offers, prices, dates, founders, locations. Inventions hide in precise details: their precision is exactly what makes them credible.
Repeat the exercise in the languages of your markets. An AI can be accurate in French and invent in English, because its sources differ from one language to another. Our free pre-diagnosis includes this verbatim: what each AI says about you, word for word, on the market of your choice.
How to correct them
You do not correct an AI by writing to it: you correct its sources. Publish the facts clearly and with dates on your own website — a complete about page, your offers and their real prices, your locations. Keep everything consistent wherever your company appears: directories, social profiles, local listings; AIs cross-check, and inconsistencies feed invention.
Then re-test a few weeks later, and after each notable model update. Fixing a hallucination is measurable: the same question, asked to the same AIs, before and after.
Frequently asked questions
Can you get a false AI answer removed?
There is no removal procedure for an organic answer. Some providers offer reporting channels, with no guarantee or timeline. The effective route remains correcting the sources the AI reads: your website and the third-party sources that talk about you.
An AI cites a link to my website that does not exist. What should I do?
Two moves: redirect that address to the relevant page of your website, so visitors no longer land on an error, and strengthen the correct page so AIs cite it instead. Watch your not-found pages: they reveal these invented links.
My company is small — is this really an issue?
It is an issue especially for small companies: the fewer reliable sources exist about you, the more the AI fills in with plausible guesses. A solid about page and consistent information in two or three reference directories already change a lot.