Search Console Reports Hallucinated URLs as Real Pages

Search Console’s Generative AI performance report, which counts how often links to a site appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, lists URLs that Google’s AI features made up as though they were pages on the site. In mid-September 2026 it recorded impressions for six URLs on The SEO Handbook that have never existed, in the same table as real pages and with nothing to show they are missing; the standard Performance report records them as well. These are hallucinated URLs: links written by the AI rather than found on the web. Each returns a 404, nothing on the site links to it, and each resembles a real page:

Google defines an impression in the Generative AI report as a time “links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search”, which holds whether or not the page behind the link exists. The report shows no queries and does not say which feature showed each link; the standard Performance report, which also lists the six, recorded no clicks on any of them.

Broken links in Google’s AI answers have been measured before. SE Ranking checked the URLs cited for 100,000 keywords and found, in December 2025, that 0.56% of AI Overview citations and 0.87% of AI Mode citations returned a 404, against 1.22% for ChatGPT. A 404 count cannot separate a deleted page from an invented one. John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, predicted in March 2025 “a slight uptick of these hallucinated links being clicked” over the following six to twelve months. These six never existed, so they were invented rather than out of date, and what is new is where they surface: Google’s own reporting presents them as the site’s pages, before anyone has clicked one.

A URL in Search Console is not proof that a page exists. Check an unfamiliar one against your own sitemap before treating it as a broken page to fix or counting it towards AI visibility; a regex filter on the page dimension separates hallucinated URLs from real ones. Where one is close enough to a real page that people may land on it, a 301 to that page turns the visit into a useful one; for the rest, a 404 page that points visitors into the site is the cover Mueller recommended.

Sources

• Generative AI performance report (Search), Search Console Help
• Google’s Mueller Predicts Uptick Of Hallucinated Links: Redirect Or Not?, Search Engine Journal
• ChatGPT is twice as likely to lead users to broken links as Google’s AI Overviews, SE Ranking