What to Do When ChatGPT Gets Your Brand Wrong
AI hallucination affects 17-33% of responses. Learn what to do when ChatGPT confidently states wrong information about your business.
You asked ChatGPT about your own company. The response was confidently wrong. Maybe it said you're headquartered in a city you've never operated in. Maybe it described products you don't sell. Maybe it confused you with a competitor.
This is called hallucination, and it's one of the most frustrating aspects of AI visibility. The AI doesn't know it's wrong. It presents false information with the same confidence as accurate facts.
Why This Happens
AI models like ChatGPT learned about brands by processing billions of documents during training. If conflicting or outdated information about your brand existed in that training data, the AI might have learned incorrect associations.
Research from Stanford HAI found that even leading AI systems hallucinate in somewhere between 17 to 33 percent of their responses on factual queries. The problem is widespread and affects businesses of all sizes.
The other issue is that AI systems sometimes fill in gaps with plausible-sounding but fabricated details. If the AI doesn't have strong information about your brand, it might generate reasonable-seeming facts that happen to be completely untrue.
The Real Cost of AI Misinformation
When ChatGPT tells a potential customer something wrong about your business, you usually never know it happened. The customer doesn't reach out to verify. They just form an incorrect impression and move on.
Survey data from Salesforce indicates that 66 percent of customers expect companies to understand their needs. When AI gives them wrong information, that expectation is violated before you even have a chance to engage.
The trust damage compounds over time. Every person who hears incorrect information about your brand from AI is a person who might share that misinformation with others or simply write you off based on false premises.
What You Can Actually Do
First, document exactly what's wrong. Ask ChatGPT multiple variations of questions about your brand and record the incorrect responses. Note patterns in what types of information are wrong and how consistently the errors appear.
Then focus on correcting the source problem. AI learns from the information ecosystem. If incorrect information about your brand exists in places the AI might have trained on, work to correct or update those sources.
Create authoritative content that clearly states correct information about your brand. Your website should have unambiguous, easily parseable facts about your company, products, services, and history. According to guidance from Google, structured data markup helps AI systems understand and accurately represent your business information.
The Wikipedia Factor
Wikipedia is particularly influential for AI training data. Studies on large language model training show that Wikipedia content is heavily weighted in how these models learn about entities.
If your brand has a Wikipedia page with errors, fixing those errors can help. If you don't have a Wikipedia page but meet notability requirements, having accurate information there can establish a strong foundation for how AI understands your brand.
Be careful with Wikipedia editing. The platform has strict rules about conflicts of interest, and attempting to add promotional content will backfire. Focus only on correcting factual errors with proper citations.
Monitoring Matters
The frustrating reality is that you can't fully control what AI says about your brand. But you can stay aware of it.
Regular monitoring helps you catch new problems as they emerge. AI models get updated. New incorrect information can appear even after you've addressed previous issues. Ongoing vigilance is necessary.
When you spot new errors, document them. Over time, you may see patterns that reveal where the misinformation is coming from, which helps you address root causes rather than just symptoms.
Prevention Is Easier Than Correction
The best approach is building such a strong, consistent information presence that AI has little reason to hallucinate about your brand.
This means maintaining accurate information across all platforms where your brand appears. It means creating clear, factual content that AI can reference confidently. It means building the kind of authoritative presence that leaves no room for AI to fill in gaps with fabricated details.
Brands with strong, consistent information footprints experience fewer hallucination problems. The investment in information hygiene pays dividends in AI accuracy.
LLM Data Kit monitors how AI talks about your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and more. Catch misinformation early and track whether your corrections are working.