AI assistants are a real time-saver when you’re running a business on the side. They can turn a messy outline into a draft, suggest headlines, or summarize a long help page. But they have a well-documented weakness, and the companies that build them say so plainly.
OpenAI’s own help article explains that ChatGPT generates answers from patterns in its training data, so it can produce wrong or misleading information while sounding confident. It calls these errors “hallucinations,” and lists invented quotes and citations among them. Google’s Search documentation makes the same point about generative AI in general: the models predict likely sequences of words rather than looking facts up, and creators should fact-check content before publishing it.
If your name, or your site’s name, is on the page, the checking is your job. Here’s a routine that fits into a normal evening.
1. Mark Every Checkable Claim
Read the draft once with a highlighter mindset. Mark every number, price, date, name, quote, statistic, rule and “studies show.” These are the places AI errors hide. Opinions and advice matter too, but facts are where a single slip can mislead a reader or embarrass you.
2. Trace Each Claim to a Primary Source
For each marked item, find the original: the official pricing page, the government site, the published study, the platform’s help center. A blog post that repeats a number isn’t a source; it’s another copy. If you can’t find where a claim came from in a few minutes, cut it or rewrite the sentence without it.
Some assistants can search the web and show citations. That helps, but open the links. A citation can point to a page that doesn’t say what the summary claims.
3. Be Extra Careful With Quotes and Links
Never publish a quote you haven’t seen in its original context. The same goes for links: click every one. AI tools can produce URLs that look right and lead nowhere.
4. Date Anything That Changes
Prices, plan limits, fees and platform policies change often. When you include one, add “as of” plus the month and year, and link the page you checked. Your readers will know how fresh the information is, and you’ll know what to update later.
5. Read It Out Loud in Your Own Voice
Fact-checking catches errors. Reading aloud catches the other problem: text that sounds like nobody in particular. Cut filler, swap generic phrases for specific ones, and add the judgment calls only you can make. Google notes that generating lots of pages without adding value for readers can run into its spam policies, so the human part isn’t optional.
A Note on Disclosure
Google suggests explaining how content was created when readers would reasonably want to know, for example a short note that AI helped with the draft. Some platforms and marketplaces have their own disclosure rules, so check the ones you publish or sell on.
Do This Today
Take one AI-assisted draft you’re working on, highlight every number, name and quote, and verify five of them against the original source. Cut or fix anything you can’t confirm. Then save your checklist so you can reuse it on the next piece.
