New research examining 16 million URLs aligns with Google’s predictions that hallucinated links will become an issue across AI platforms.
An Ahrefs study shows that AI assistants send users to broken web pages nearly three times more often than Google Search.
The data arrives six months after Google’s John Mueller raised awareness about this issue.
ChatGPT Leads In URL Hallucination Rates
ChatGPT creates the most fake URLs among all AI assistants tested. The study found that 1% of URLs people clicked led to 404 pages. Google’s rate is just 0.15%.
The problem gets worse when looking at all URLs ChatGPT mentions, not just clicked ones. Here, 2.38% lead to error pages. Compare this to Google’s top search results, where only 0.84% are broken links.
Claude came in second with 0.58% broken links for clicked URLs. Copilot had 0.34%, Perplexity 0.31%, and Gemini 0.21%. Mistral had the best rate at 0.12%, but it also sends the least traffic to websites.
Why Does This Happen?
The research found two main reasons why AI creates fake links.
First, some URLs used to exist but don’t anymore. When AI relies on old information instead of searching the web in real-time, it might suggest pages that have been deleted or moved.
Second, AI sometimes invents URLs that sound right but never existed.
Ryan Law from Ahrefs shared examples from their own site. AI assistants created fake URLs like “/blog/internal-links/” and “/blog/newsletter/” because these sound like pages Ahrefs might have. But they don’t actually exist.
Limited Impact on Overall Traffic
The problem may seem significant, but most websites won’t notice much impact. AI assistants only bring in about 0.25% of website traffic. Google, by comparison, drives 39.35% of traffic.
This means fake URLs affect a tiny portion of an already small traffic source. Still, the issue might grow as more people use AI for research and information.
The study also found that 74% of new web pages contain AI-generated content. When this content includes fake links, web crawlers might index them, spreading the problem further.
Mueller’s Prediction Proves Accurate
These findings match what Google’s John Mueller predicted in March. He forecasted a “slight uptick of these hallucinated links being clicked” over the next 6-12 months.
Mueller suggested focusing on better 404 pages rather than chasing accidental traffic.
His advice to collect data before making big changes looks smart now, given the small traffic impact Ahrefs found.
Mueller also predicted the problem would fade as AI services improve how they handle URLs. Time will tell if he’s right about this, too.
Looking Forward
For now, most websites should focus on two things. Create helpful 404 pages for users who hit broken links. Then, set up redirects only for fake URLs that get meaningful traffic.
This allows you to handle the problem without overreacting to what remains a minor issue for most sites.
