AI Link Hallucinations: Are they harming your brand?
It might surprise you (or it might be quite predictable) to know that AI is not always giving you entirely accurate information. The nature of it is to fill in the gaps, even when those gaps are not really… well… true. In fact, AI can really make up anything, ranging from what your brand actually delivers to actual hyperlinks to your site that do not even exist!
We have been running a bunch of tests on the output of LLMs. In particular, we have been checking that the links they cite result in 200 responses.
They don’t, but the reasons are not what you might expect!
The Problem:
In many AI overviews and explanations of your brand, AI will create hyperlinks towards relevant pages. However, not all of those links are necessarily working. We want to look deeper at what’s happening, and how on earth we can start to fix this.
We have run several lookups across different LLMs using our AI scanner and recorded all broken links that appear in results. The look-ups are always related to a brand, making it increasingly relevant to brand managers as they delve deeper into AIO.
Gemini has shown more false links than ChatGPT
These are NOT just old links!
We looked at some of these broken URLs on Majestic, who have an excellent historical index, which goes back many years. Way before the training data of the LLMs stopped learning. What is really interesting is that you might assume that a company has simply changed a URL or deleted something in the interim, but we are finding that this is not always true. In fact, sometimes these URLs never existed and have been completely hallucinated while generating a response.
Of course, deleted content may sometimes play a part, but the more common reason seems to be that the LLMs almost assume a URL structure is consistent, even though they have not actually read the URL they are citing.
Here is an excellent example on AHREFs.com where the URL probably did exist, but never got redirected:
Majestic shows that at least two URLS link to this dead page. This can explain how this one happened…
But consider this one found in an LLM output citing a MOZ URL that NEVER existed!
At least… not according to Archive.org:
In fact – again, this one DID exist, at least long enough for a bunch of sites to link to the dead page. The content is still live if you remove “blog” from the URL, suggesting a change in the site structure at some point.
How to find link errors from AI overviews
Waikay now has a feature which helps you to generate, locate, and store historical data on how AI links to you and your competitor’s websites. Here’s how to get started.
First, start a report:
Once this has finished, take a look at your mentions:
Here we can see three separate sections. This is your site’s mentions (links that have been made with your site’s domain); Mentions to competitors (where links have been placed directing to your competitor pages); and mentions errors (the status of all of the links). Keep in mind that this is just the initial brand overview. To get a more specific report on different topics within your site you will need to create more reports.
To do this, head to a new report:
Here you will have the ability to create reports based on topics. We recommend making enough reports to cover all of your main areas:
How can I redirect bad links?
Fixing it is another story. It involves optimizing your content to be fully readable for LLMs and having a predictable and sensible URL structure across your whole site. To avoid overwhelming this blog post, I have written another focusing entirely on the AIO processes you can use to fix this.
Bottom line… While AI can be an invaluable tool for content generation, it’s clear that it’s not always perfect, especially when it comes to creating and citing links. The ability of AI to fabricate URLs that don’t actually exist can lead to significant issues for brands, ranging from misdirected traffic to lost opportunities for engagement. By proactively identifying and addressing these broken links, whether through tools like Waikai or refining your content to ensure it is better optimized for AI, you can ensure that your digital presence remains accurate and effective. As AI continues to evolve, it’s essential to stay vigilant and informed, regularly checking and redirecting faulty links to maintain your brand’s integrity and SEO performance.
Written by: Dixon Jones
Reviewed by: Genie Jones
