# Hallucination

> A confident claim in an AI answer that no source supports.

## What it means in practice

For brand monitoring the important cases are invented products, wrong pricing, and attributed quotes that were never said. These are visible only by reading the answer text, which is why storing the raw answer behind every score matters: an aggregate that says "mentioned" cannot distinguish an accurate recommendation from a fabricated one.

## Category

Concept in How AI answers work.
This definition is editorial category vocabulary, not a metric refd computes.