Can hallucination be eliminated completely?

Grounding and refusal remove the common case — inventing facts from model memory — but no system that generates language can be guaranteed. That is exactly why every answer carries a citation: it makes verification a click rather than an act of faith.

What is the single most effective control?

Pruning stale content. Wrong-but-indexed pages produce confident wrong answers with a citation attached, which is more dangerous than a gap because it looks trustworthy.

How often should I re-test?

After any significant content change, and periodically otherwise. Sampling logged conversations is the low-effort version and catches most drift.

Grow

Stop your assistant from inventing answers

The architecture prevents most of it. The rest is configuration and testing you have to do deliberately.

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A confident wrong answer is the expensive failure

A refusal costs a little goodwill. An invented refund policy that a customer acts on costs the refund, the trust, and often the account. The two failures are not remotely comparable, which is why the system is built to prefer the first.

Answers that sound authoritative and cite nothing
Policies stated that appear nowhere on your site
Confident replies about features that do not exist
No process for testing accuracy before launch

Rely on grounding, then verify it

Answers are generated from retrieved passages of your content rather than from model memory, and every answer carries the source. Check the citation rather than the answer when testing: a correct answer citing an unrelated page means retrieval is not working and will fail on the next question.

Write explicit refusal rules

In the persona settings, name the categories it must decline — individual account questions, quotes, advice. Explicit boundaries are more dependable than assuming the absence of content will produce a refusal.

Remove content that invites bad answers

Outdated pages, superseded pricing, and old policy documents are worse than missing content, because they will be retrieved and cited confidently. Indexing an archive is a common cause of authoritative wrong answers.

Prune stale pages

An old pricing page will be cited as current.

Watch the citations

They tell you which pages are producing bad answers.

Test adversarially before launch

Do not only ask questions you know it can answer. Ask things that are plausible but uncovered, things adjacent to your content, and things you explicitly told it to refuse. That is where invention shows up, and it is far cheaper to find it yourself.

The Quality tab showing golden questions the bot must keep answering correctly, with counts for checks, pass rate, failing checks and when the last run happened, above a list of individual questions marked pass or fail. — Golden questions are the regression test. They re-run weekly and email you when the pass rate drops, which is how you find out a content edit broke an answer.

Common questions

Can hallucination be eliminated completely?: Grounding and refusal remove the common case — inventing facts from model memory — but no system that generates language can be guaranteed. That is exactly why every answer carries a citation: it makes verification a click rather than an act of faith.
What is the single most effective control?: Pruning stale content. Wrong-but-indexed pages produce confident wrong answers with a citation attached, which is more dangerous than a gap because it looks trustworthy.
How often should I re-test?: After any significant content change, and periodically otherwise. Sampling logged conversations is the low-effort version and catches most drift.