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by The Notified Team on Sep 4, 2026, 12:58:14 PM
AI hallucinations don't always look like fabricated facts. More often, they appear as outdated, incomplete, or misweighted corporate content. Learn three ways IR and PR teams can improve the signals AI uses to understand their business.
AI is the first stop for many investors, journalists, customers, and employees looking to understand your company. But is it telling the right story?
AI hallucinations have become a growing concern for communications teams – ‘made up’ facts that AI uses to fill in the gaps about your story. In practice, the issue is often less about fabricated information and more about missing context, outdated information, or misplaced emphasis. An old issue gets more attention than it deserves. A key business driver gets overlooked. Information from previous quarters resurfaces long after the narrative has moved on.
As AI-generated answers become part of stakeholder research, IR and PR teams need a process for monitoring and managing how those answers are formed.
1. Audit What AI Already Thinks About You
The fastest way to identify AI hallucinations is to look for them. A simple perception audit can establish a baseline for how AI currently understands your company and expose gaps in your narrative.
Start by asking ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity the same questions your stakeholders might ask:
- What does the company do?
- What drove recent performance?
- What are the biggest risks or opportunities?
The objective isn't to judge the answer. Use your audit to identify missing context, outdated information, and recurring misconceptions.
AI often produces answers that sound complete while leaving out information that materially changes the story. Those omissions can shape perception long before they surface as a media inquiry, analyst question, or investor concern.
Document the responses so you can measure changes over time. Running the same prompts every quarter creates a useful benchmark and helps you see whether AI's understanding of your company is improving or drifting.
Not sure where to start? We developed a guide with more than 30 prompts to help teams evaluate how AI interprets their organization.
IR Teams: We have an IR focused audit for you too. Evaluate how AI interprets your earnings results, guidance, risks, and investment narrative by using our AI perception study framework as part of your communications process.
2. Make Your Official Sources Hard to Misinterpret
Unfortunately, the hallucinations may be coming from inside the house.
When public information is outdated, inconsistent, or difficult to interpret, AI systems have to make sense of conflicting signals. The result is often a version of your story that isn't technically wrong but still misses the point.
That makes content quality one of your strongest defenses.
Clear structure, consistent messaging, and authoritative sourcing help AI determine which information should carry the most weight when answering questions about your company.
Research from Notified's analysis of 8,000 press releases found that structure is one of the strongest drivers of AI visibility and citation performance. Well-organized content can begin appearing in AI-generated answers within hours. Traditional search visibility often takes much longer to develop.
The implication is straightforward. If your content is easier to read, interpret, and verify than a competitor's, AI is more likely to reference your narrative first.
Guideposts like Notified’s SOAR Content Framework™ can help create consistency across both new and existing content:
- Structure: Is the content organized so people and machines can easily understand it?
- Originality: Does it contribute information that isn't already widely available?
- Authority: Does it clearly demonstrate expertise and credibility?
- Recency: Is the information current and actively maintained?
Better inputs produce better outputs. The same rule applies to AI.
3. Reinforce Your Narrative Before AI Fills the Gaps
AI doesn't rely on a single source to form an understanding of your company.
Websites, news coverage, earnings materials, analyst commentary, thought leadership content, other public sources, the AI will use all the publicly available info it can get its robotic hands on. And every mention contributes to the picture it builds.
The only portion you can truly control is the content you own. When critical owned content hasn't been updated in months, AI starts leaning on older information. Previous disclosures, historical media coverage, and stale websites can begin carrying more weight than they should.
Keeping your narrative current requires reinforcement; however, creating more content is not always the answer.
Many IR and PR teams already have valuable assets that simply need attention. A content audit can reveal which pages, reports, releases, and articles are generating engagement or appearing in AI-generated answers. Updating those assets with current messaging, fresh data, and additional context is often a faster path to improvement than starting from a blank page.
It also helps to know which content AI is pulling from. For example, citation reporting can identify the releases, articles, and pages influencing AI-generated answers. That visibility makes it easier to prioritize updates and focus resources where they will have the greatest impact.
Before creating something new, make sure your existing content is still doing its job.
See How AI Describes Your Company Before Your Stakeholders Do
Download the AI-First PR Content Playbook
Bottom Line: Manage the Signals, Not the Model
AI hallucinations rarely appear out of nowhere. They usually reflect problems in the information surrounding your company.
The good news is that you can fix this (and fast - 90 days, fast). The companies performing best in an AI-driven information environment treat their narrative like a living asset. They regularly check how AI describes the business. They update high-value content. They make important information easy to find and easy to understand. Most importantly, they stop treating content like a one-time publication.
Every earnings release, newsroom article, executive interview, media mention, and website update contributes to the information AI uses to understand your company. When those signals align, AI is more likely to reinforce your intended narrative. When they don't, AI starts making judgment calls on your behalf.
You won't control every answer AI generates. Nobody can. What you can control is the quality, consistency, and freshness of the information available to it.
And when AI becomes the first place stakeholders go for answers, managing your narrative is no longer just about what you publish. It's about what gets understood.
About Notified
Notified, Equiniti’s market engagement business, helps public relations and investor relations professionals earn attention, measure engagement and deliver results through its integrated platforms Content OS™ and IR Hub™. Click here to learn why more than 50% of the S&P 500 trust Notified’s solutions and services to drive demand and attract capital.
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