“Although the primary page on registering a company was up-to-date, users are increasingly using narrower, more nuanced searches.
This means ‘agentic search’, where GenAI performs multiple steps to meet a user’s objective, looks for content that meets these niche scenarios.
As a result, the GenAI bot pulled information from an unmaintained, unused GOV.UK page that mentioned ‘charity’, instead of the primary GOV.UK page that is regularly monitored.
In the past, most of those outdated, niche pages would fall into the 0-view abyss, never to be stumbled on again. Now, as Andrea outlined in her blog post, GenAI bots are designed to search and gather information from all corners of the internet.
In February 2024, there were 700,000 published pages on GOV.UK. In the 2 years since, that number has increased substantially.
This was never ideal from an environmental perspective. It’s also not what the founders of GOV.UK intended, who wanted nodes of information to help users complete a task, rather than the proliferation of pages.
Not only are GenAI bots picking up outdated information from GOV.UK, but they’re also ‘hallucinating’ answers.”
How we’re preventing AI misinformation at DBT
There’s also some good practical advice in this post on how to try and prevent AI from providing false information.