The address that has never existed
Checking one subject, an assistant cited a .com address assembled from his own name. It looks exactly like the sort of address a person in his position would own.
It has never had a DNS record. Not blocked, not expired, not temporarily down: it has never existed. We checked at the name server rather than assuming from a failed page load, because those are different answers.
The real page that says nothing about him
The second case is subtler and more likely. A different assistant cited a genuine encyclopaedia list page, which exists, loads, and is exactly the kind of page you would expect to find the subject's company on.
The company is not on it. Not under its own name, not under any variation. The citation is to a real, reputable, entirely irrelevant page.
A citation to a real page that does not mention you is harder to catch than a citation to nothing, because the link works.
We only found it because we read the cited page before writing anything about what it said. That rule is now fixed in how these documents get written: read the source, then characterise it.
What this means for you
It means a confident answer with citations under it is not self verifying, and neither you nor the person reading about you can tell the difference from the outside.
It also means a thin record invites this. Both cases above came from subjects with very little solid, clearly attributed material available. When there is not much to rely on, something gets assembled to fill the gap.
That is the practical argument for having a page of your own that states the plain facts clearly. Not because it prevents invention, which nothing does, but because it gives the assistant something real and easy to use.
What we do about it in a report
Every source an assistant cites in a reading we hand over has been opened. A citation that does not exist is recorded as that, and a citation to a page that does not mention the subject is recorded as that, because they are different faults and both are findings.
Neither is reported as the assistant lying. It is a machine assembling a plausible address or reaching for a nearby page, and saying so plainly is more useful to a client than outrage.
Two cases from one engagement in October 2026. One assistant cited a .com address built from the subject's own name which has never had a DNS record. Another cited a real encyclopaedia list page which does not mention the subject anywhere.