New Study: How Often Do AI Assistants Hallucinate Links? (16 Million URLs Studied)

ahrefsblog: “AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can hallucinate URLs and direct visitors to non-existent pages on your website. But how often does it happen? To find out, we looked at the http status of 16 million unique URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral.

We found that AI assistants send visitors to 404 pages 2.87x more often than Google Search. ChatGPT is the greatest offender, with 1.01% of clicked URLs and 2.38% of all cited URLs returning a 404 status (compared to baseline 404 rates of 0.15% and 0.84% respectively). Here’s what we found:

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Posted in: AI, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

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New Study: How Often Do AI Assistants Hallucinate Links? (16 Million URLs Studied)

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