← Glossary
Hallucination
A confident statement from a model that is not supported by any source, including invented facts about brands.
The word covers a range of failures: an invented statistic, a feature a product does not have, a price that is wrong, or a company described as doing something it does not do.
For a brand, the risk is not only being absent from answers but being present incorrectly. An assistant asserting that you lack a feature you shipped last year is a commercial problem that no amount of ranking fixes, and it is only findable by reading the answers.
Retrieval reduces hallucination but does not remove it. Models still paraphrase, and a paraphrase can drift from the source it was grounded in.
Related
GroundingTying a generated statement to a specific retrieved source, so the claim can be attributed rather than invented.Brand sentimentWhether a mention of your brand in an AI answer is positive, neutral or negative.Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)The pattern where a model searches for relevant documents first, then writes its answer using what it found.