AI is spreading lies about your business right now
When someone asks Google or ChatGPT about your business, the answer is occasionally wrong. Hallucinations are not random, which means they are fixable. Here is the whole playbook.
AI is spreading lies about your business right now. When someone goes to Google or ChatGPT and asks about your business, AI is at least occasionally saying something that is not true. Even if you are lucky and it gives true information 95 percent of the time, every once in a while it is saying something that is not. And for some businesses it is much worse than others. I hear from these businesses every week. So I thought I would break down how this gets fixed, step by step, because you can absolutely do it yourself.
First, find out what AI actually says about you
You need to identify what information AI is reliably getting wrong about your business. Most owners ask AI about their own business so often that they already know. If you do not, just ask a bunch of questions about your business and how you compare to your competitors, the way a customer would.
Once you spot what AI is getting wrong, you need to figure out why. Hallucinations are not random. If a model is getting something wrong about you, it is because it is confused about what it is seeing online. We cover the security side of this on the news pages, where researchers keep showing that AI mistakes are predictable enough to be exploited. The same predictability is what makes your problem fixable. Search your question in Google or ChatGPT and check the citations. Open every website link it shares in the response. You can do this at scale with software, and Peec AI is a good example of the tooling, but if you do not want to pay for software, you can do it manually.
Situation one: the bad information is on a page you control
As you check citations, you will typically find one of three situations. The best one is that the incorrect information is on your own website or another property you control. In that case, update the content and you are done. It is usually not that easy.
Situation two: the bad information is on someone else's page
The next situation is that the incorrect information lives on a website you do not control. First, reach out to whoever does control it and ask them to update it. If they do, great. Most of the time they will not, and then you need to replace the content instead.
To do that, you need to understand why the AI cited that page in the first place. When you entered your prompt, the model ran a series of what are called fan-out queries, separate searches it fires off behind the scenes, and the page you are trying to replace ranked for one of them. ChatGPT will actually reveal what those fan-out queries are, and tracking software will show you too. Google will not show you the queries, but if you look at the title of the cited page, you can usually make a close guess.
Then you make a similar piece of content on your own site that is more relevant and goes deeper. The more authority your website has, the easier it is to displace the source. Either way it is worth the shot, because until you replace that citation, the model keeps reading the same wrong page and repeating it. Remember that your next visitor is an agent: whatever the winning page says, the machines will say back to your customers.
Situation three: there is no bad information, the AI is just confused
The third situation is that no incorrect information exists anywhere. The model is simply confused, and the most common version is that it has blended your company with a company that has a similar name. The fix is content that addresses the misunderstanding head on. If the AI is already citing a page on your website for the query, clear it up on that page; for brand confusion, add a section with a heading like Your Brand vs Their Brand. If AI is not citing your site, or the confusion shows up across a large set of queries, create a new page that directly addresses it: a page titled Your Brand vs Their Brand, explaining that these are two different companies, and that yours, naturally, is the better one.
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