AI-Powered search engines are generating fake links. In a new study from Ahrefs, the company found that engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity are citing webpages that don’t actually exist. According to the study, ChatGPT is more prone to “hallucinating links”, “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).” Ryan Law and Xibejia Guan, the two employees behind the study, contributed the faulty links to either “URLs that may have been real at one point, but have since been deleted” or “true hallucinations,” in which “they fit the expected pattern of URLs for a given website,” but aren’t real. Here’s what to know.
What Else Did the Study Say?
- After ChatGPT, Claude led with 0.58% of all cited URLs resulting in a 404 error, followed by Copilot (0.34%), Perplexity (0.31%), and Gemini (0.21%).
- Mistral had the lowest rate (0.12%), but it also had the least amount of referral traffic.
- “The average 404 rate across all AI assistants was 0.43%. Compared to the 404 rate to URLs referred by Google, AI assistants send visitors to 404 pages at 2.87x the rate of Google Search.”
- Not all links are clicked on by visitors, which means the results found in the study could be underreported.
Why Does it Matter if AI-Powered Search Engines Generate Fake Links?
Nobody likes a fake link. If your website is cited in a search result, and a visitor clicks on it, only to realize that it’s not real, they’ll probably not want to spend anymore time on your website. By hallucinating links, AI-powered search engines are hurting your website’s credibility amongst consumers.
Think AI-Powered Search Engines Have Hallucinated Links on Your Website? Here’s How to Find Out.
- You can set up your website analytics tracking to show visits from AI-powered search engines.
- Create an Apps Script to “return the http status for URLs in a Google Sheet” and move it to Google Sheets.
- Filter it to only show “404 URLs”.
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