Hallucination
A hallucination is AI search stating something false with the same confidence it states something true.
In a little more detail
It happens because the model is predicting plausible text, not retrieving verified facts. It is the reason answers that cite live sources are more trustworthy than answers written from memory alone.
Related terms
- LLM: An LLM, or large language model, is the program underneath AI search: software trained on an enormous amount of text that predicts what words should come next.
- Retrieval: Retrieval is the step where AI search fetches live web pages in the middle of answering you, instead of relying only on what it already knows.
- Grounding: Grounding is tying an answer to real fetched sources rather than letting the model answer from memory.
See it on your own site
The scan reads your site the way AI search does and reports where you stand on this and sixteen other checks.