A few months ago I noticed something mildly interesting that seemed both obvious and confusing: ChatGPT had been linking users to non-existent locations on this website. Now, chatbots hallucinate all of the time, so it makes sense that they would just make up URLs and provide them to users. But what was confusing to me is that most of these phony URLs were related to the movie The Matrix. Below you can see a table of the most common chatbot-related 404s I received for the first six months of this year.
| Page Path | Chatbot Source | Views (Visits) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| /matrix/ | chatgpt.com | 46 | Most frequent broken link |
| /misc/matrix/ | chatgpt.com | 25 | |
| /matrix-effect/ | chatgpt.com | 18 | |
| /software/t | chatgpt.com | 14 | Partial/broken URL |
| /taag?spm=… | qianwen.com | 11 | AI assistant from Alibaba |
| /text-animation/ | chatgpt.com | 11 | |
| /birthday/ | chatgpt.com | 7 | |
| /experiments/heart/ | chatgpt.com | 7 | |
| /games/asteroids/ | copilot.com | 7 | Microsoft AI referrer |
| /games/heart/ | chatgpt.com | 7 | |
| /romantic/ | chatgpt.com | 7 | |
| /text-scroller/ | chatgpt.com | 7 | |
| /ascii-art-generator/ | gemini.google.com | 4 | Google AI referrer |
| /image-animator/ | chatgpt.com | 4 | |
| /led-banner/ | chatgpt.com | 4 | |
| /misc/matrix-code-rain/ | chatgpt.com | 4 |
In addition to the above table, there were also a bunch of one-off broken links like /software/bauklotze/cmatrix/.
Now, I have nothing against The Matrix, it’s a fine movie, but this website is mostly random apps I’ve developed over the years and legacy programming content. I don’t remember ever talking about that movie here. Nor do I remember talking about it anywhere online. After poking around, the closest thing I could find was a comment someone made on one of my blog posts many years ago where they mentioned the movie in passing.
So, what gives? Why The Matrix? Well, this is where things get a bit murky. When I asked directly, ChatGPT told me it’s because of connections and themes throughout my site. It noted that “matrix rain” is a common thing for programmers to build and that my site is “strongly associated with visual/programming experiments”. It also noted that the site is associated with text art, which is associated with the terminal, which is related to digital rain. So if this is to be believed, it sounds like ChatGPT is connecting dots that maybe shouldn’t be connected.
This explanation mostly makes sense, but when it comes to LLMs, convincing answers are what they’re best at, so they should be taken with a grain of salt. When I asked Gemini it actually gave me a slightly different answer and noted The Matrix-like configurations in my Keyboard Layout Analyzer and its “Neo” layout. It also pointed out I have a “Matrix” theme in my Snake game (something I’d forgotten about, as that theme was user submitted). So again, connecting dots that shouldn’t be connected, but different dots this time.
Whatever the case, it’s amusing, and from what I’ve read online this is a known issue. Lots of sites apparently have LLMs sending them traffic to spots that don’t exist. In fact, many SEO experts recommend putting up some content to catch these users so they’re not dumped onto a 404 page. I figured I would follow this advice, so in August I created a digital rain page and directed all Matrix-related traffic there. However, I apparently acted too late, as sometime in July ChatGPT mostly stopped hallucinating Matrix-related URLs for this site. This seems to coincide with GPT-5.6, so I’m assuming something in an earlier model mistakenly connected my site to the movie.
It makes me a little sad I missed the boat on capitalizing on this, but I’m glad to have stumbled upon it. At the very least it was amusing seeing all of the fake URLs LLMs had generated for my site. I don’t know if newer models will hallucinate URLs as much as their predecessors, but maybe this is a lesson that I should pay better attention to my analytics. And even if these URLs were strange and unrelated to what I post here, each broken link represented someone who was looking for something, and after crunching all of the data in the world, ChatGPT thought they would find it here.