Lesson 19 / 25

When Assistants Get Your Brand Wrong

Find hallucinated or outdated claims and fix them at their sources.

Fix the source, then report

Assistants can state wrong prices, discontinued features, invented awards or even confuse you with a similarly named company. Run regular branded prompts ("what is Acme Tasks?", "how much does it cost?", "is it safe?") and compare answers to your brand facts page. When something is wrong: (1) find where the wrong claim could come from (an old blog post, a stale directory entry, a competitor comparison) and correct or update that source; (2) publish a clear, dated page with the right fact; (3) use the assistant's feedback or report option on specific bad answers; (4) re-test after a few weeks. You cannot edit a model's memory directly, so source quality and retrieval are your main tools.

Protect trust

Assistants sometimes get brands wrong. Detect it, correct the sources and stay on the right side of ethics.

Three duties: detect, correct, behave.
Figure 6.1 — Detect, correct and behave.

A correction log

Track each issue to resolution. It also shows which sources cause the most errors.

Date        Assistant   Wrong claim                    Likely source           Action                         Status
2026-09-20  assistant-x "free plan has 10 users"        2023 blog post          update post + add banner       fixed 10-02
2026-09-20  assistant-y "founded 2018"                  directory listing       corrected listing              pending
2026-09-27  assistant-x "acquired by BigCorp"           name clash w/ other co  publish clarity page, report  re-test 10-25

Retire old pages carefully

Old pricing or product pages can keep feeding outdated answers. Update them, add a clear "archived/out of date" note with a link to the current page, or redirect them appropriately.

Quick check: An assistant states an outdated price. What is the best first step?

  • Delete your whole website
  • Ignore it forever
  • Edit the model weights directly
  • Find and update the source that may be feeding the old figure
Answer

Find and update the source that may be feeding the old figure — You cannot edit a model, but you can fix the pages and listings it learns from or retrieves.