# Factual accuracy

> Factual accuracy is whether what AI models say about your brand is true: the right services, location, contact details and other facts.

- **Area:** [AI Visibility](https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-visibility)
- **Tool:** [AI Visibility](https://be1st.ai/tools/ai-visibility)
- **Page:** https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-visibility/factual-accuracy

## Why it matters

AI hallucinations are a real problem: models can confidently state incorrect facts about your company. A wrong price, nonexistent product, or incorrect contact can deter a potential customer or damage your reputation. Regular monitoring of factual accuracy enables you to identify and correct wrong information by updating structured data and publicly available sources.

## In practice

AI claims about your company: 'Company XY was founded in 2005, is headquartered in Chicago, and offers 3 main products.' In reality, it was founded in 2008, is based in New York, and offers 5 products. Factual accuracy is therefore 0 out of 3 key facts (0%). The solution is to update information on Wikipedia, in business registries, on LinkedIn, and deploy correct Organization schema.

## How be1st checks it

Evaluates the correctness of facts that AI models state about your brand. It checks the accuracy of basic data: company name, founding year, headquarters, products, prices, contact information, number of employees, and other verifiable facts. Expressed as a percentage of correct facts out of the total number of verifiable AI claims about your brand. be1st compares the profile AI builds about the site with the site's actual content: with a similarity below 0.35 it is a hallucination and the knowledge level drops to 'confused'.

[AI Visibility](https://be1st.ai/tools/ai-visibility).

## Sources

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774) (OpenAI)
- [Why language models hallucinate](https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/) (OpenAI)
- [Free AI Brand Visibility Tool: Check Your AI Search Presence](https://www.semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker/) (Semrush)

## Related terms

- [Knowledge level](https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-visibility/knowledge-level): Knowledge level is how much an AI model knows about your domain and brand when asked directly, from nothing at all to a complete and correct profile.
- [Structured data](https://be1st.ai/glossary/seo/structured-data): Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD with the Schema.org vocabulary, that says what a page contains: a product, an article, a company or an event.
- [Organization schema](https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-readiness/organization-schema): Organization schema is Schema.org structured data that describes the company behind a website: its name, logo, contact details and social profiles.
- [Competitive position](https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-visibility/competitive-position): Competitive position is where your brand stands next to its competitors in AI answers: how often models name it and how high they rank it.
- [Update freshness](https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-visibility/update-freshness): Update freshness is how current the information AI models give about your brand is, for example whether they know your latest products and changes.
- [Brand mention rate](https://be1st.ai/glossary/ai-visibility/brand-mention-rate): Brand mention rate is the share of relevant AI answers that name your brand, expressed as a percentage.