A study of 17,211 citations shows that simply posting on the right forums is enough to appear in AI search engine results; a service costing $14 was picked up within an hour.
AI-powered search engines don't just rank pages: they choose the sources they cite themselves and write the response before the user sees any link. Researchers wanted to measure how much this selection step could be hijacked by simple posts on sites where anyone can write.
Highly concentrated and easy-to-access sources
Across ten AI search platforms, the team analyzed 17,211 citations linking to 6,356 domains. The twenty most cited domains capture between 20.5% and 70.8% of citations, depending on the platform, and 15 of the 22 published sites tested associated with these domains only had a low or medium barrier to account creation and uploading.
The most telling experience: a fabricated concept, published on these platforms, was cited by 8 out of 10 search engines within seven days. A single article posted on a privileged site weighed more than twenty messages on less popular sites. And the path is already commercialized: a purchase of "GEO" (optimization for generative engines) at $14 produced 13 publications, whose tagged content was picked up by one of the engines in less than an hour.
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