Glossary
Hallucination
A hallucination is a confident but false statement produced by a language model. For brands this shows up as invented pricing, discontinued products, wrong leadership names or misattributed positioning — errors that read as authoritative and are repeated to buyers who have no way to check them.
In plain terms
The engine makes something up about you and says it with total confidence.
Why it matters for B2B
An unchallenged hallucination becomes the answer buyers act on. Monitoring what engines say about you is a risk control, not only a marketing metric.
How to apply it
- Include factual questions about your own brand in the prompt set and log the answers.
- Publish the correct facts in an unambiguous, crawlable form on your own domain.
- Fix the same fact wherever third parties have it wrong; the engine may be grounding on them.
Related terms
Back to the full glossary (25 terms).
Ranking is no longer enough
You need to be cited, mentioned, and recommended.
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