Hallucination

A hallucination is when an AI system generates a plausible-sounding but factually unsupported claim, a wrong statistic, a misattributed quote, a fabricated detail, that isn't actually backed by any of the sources it retrieved when forming its answer.

Why it matters

When a model hallucinates false information about a brand and nothing corrects it, that error can sit in front of every user who asks a related question afterward. Monitoring what AI systems are actually saying, and how accurately, is a direct brand-safety concern, not just a visibility one.

Related terms

• Grounding

  Grounding is when an AI system anchors its generated response in specific retrieved source material, a live web page, a document, a database record, rather than relying only on patterns learned during training. It's what separates a cited answer from an unsupported one.

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

  Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is the architecture behind most AI search: the system retrieves a set of relevant documents or passages at query time, then generates its answer grounded in that retrieved material, rather than purely from what it learned during training.