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
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.
Example
A prospective customer asks an AI chatbot about a mid-sized CRM vendor's enterprise pricing and receives a confident but entirely invented figure, because no current pricing page existed for the model to ground its answer in — the vendor only discovers the error after a lead mentions the wrong number on a sales call.
Related terms
Back to the full glossary (75 terms).
Ranking is no longer enough
You need to be cited, mentioned, and recommended.
Being cited, mentioned, and recommended are three different outcomes, and most brands only ever achieve the first one. Ranking is no longer enough because AI engines answer buyers directly and name only a short list of vendors as the recommendation — everyone else is cited in passing, if at all. Get a free AI Visibility Report to see exactly where your brand appears today across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, where competitors are winning the recommendation instead, and what's keeping you from moving up the shortlist.