Google AI Overview hallucinating Hugo options?

support
1

When I did a search for building hugo and showing the time taken, AI Overview in Google suggests:

To see the build time when using `hugo serve`, you'll need to either run `hugo` with the `--time` flag or analyze the output messages during the build process. The `--time` flag is likely the most direct way to get the build time displayed explicitly.

Here's how to do it:

1. **1.** Using `--time` with `hugo`:

  * Open your terminal and navigate to your Hugo site's root directory.
  * Run the command: `hugo --time serve`.
  * This will start the development server and show the build time in the console output.

However, that flag doesn’t work and I can’t see it in the documentation, suggesting it is just being made up?

P.

2

Yes. Mostly because those LLMs can’t keep up with the latest news. You will need to create an MCP server for the repo and the docs repo or create your own LLM from the project. If you control what it knows it will reason better.

Google AI in Search results is you as a Lab Piglet and them testing things on you. I wouldn’t trust any of it.

3 Likes
3

I don’t think it’s out of date, I think it’s simply made up, but open to correction.

P.

4

Your question was if it’s made up, my answer was yes. But the Discourse requires “at least 5 characters” for a post, so I hallucinated some.

A search result that is provably wrong makes Google Search useless.

5

No, mostly because they … guess a lot. There never ever was a --time flag in Hugo, so that’s guesswork.