ahrefs Study Found AI and Hallucinated 404 Links Go Hand in Hand

Brett Tabkeon

Ahrefs just ran a study on how often AI assistants hallucinate links. The team tested thousands of prompts and found that fabricated citations are still a major issue across most models.

Some of the more interesting stats:

  • Over 2% of links were 404 in ChatGPT citations.
  • Over 1% of links were 404 when clicked.

For SEOs, this matters in two ways:

  1. Reputation risk - If AI points to your site with fake or broken references, it can hurt trust in your brand.
  2. Traffic impact - As agents and AI search interfaces rely more on direct citations, the accuracy of those links will shape how (or if) users ever reach you.

The takeaway: keep monitoring mentions of your brand and site in AI outputs, just as you would backlinks. Hallucinated links aren’t just an AI quirk—they’re already shaping visibility in the new search ecosystem.