Chatbots are quoting bulk AI sites as if they are experts
A Washington Post test found Microsoft's Copilot citing one error-prone AI-built site in 75% of its election answers.
Chatbots are pulling election answers from three small, newly launched websites built largely by AI, according to tests by The Washington Post that Glenn Gabe flagged on X. One of them, the error-prone Ballot Brief, was cited by Microsoft's Copilot in 75% of answers and by ChatGPT in 22%.
Microsoft’s Copilot cited it in 75 percent of answers.
the AI platforms are still building their core systems and anti-spam systems
Gabe says that site had scaled to nearly 70,000 URLs indexed (pages Google has stored and can show) as of the morning he posted. The Post described the site as "almost entirely dependent on AI to gather and summarize data."
almost entirely dependent on AI to gather and summarize data.
The numbers
A person named Ezrick, quoted in the Post piece, said his own data shows Microsoft's AI systems referred to the Ballot Brief more than 680,000 times over a 30 day period spanning September and October. ChatGPT was initially even more reliant, using the Ballot Brief as its top source for answers in September. After the Post shared its results with OpenAI, that figure dropped to 4 percent in a second round of tests.
Isabel Linzer, an elections analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Post the findings show how easy it can be to get chatbots to rely on information "some random person publishes on an AI-generated website."
Why this matters for a small site
If you have been told that AI assistants only quote established, trusted brands, this is evidence against that. The systems that decide which pages a chatbot repeats are still being built. Gabe put it plainly, saying the AI platforms are still building their core systems and anti-spam systems. A site with no track record and tens of thousands of machine-made pages beat better sources on a topic where accuracy obviously matters.
That cuts two ways. It means a smaller business can get quoted by these tools today without a decades-old domain. It also means the gap is temporary. OpenAI changed its behaviour within a week of being asked about it, which shows how quickly a source can go from top of the pile to 4 percent. Gabe says he will cover Google soon.
So do not read this as permission to mass produce pages. The thing that got fixed first was the bulk AI site. Nothing in the Post's testing suggests those 70,000 pages are a durable strategy, and the one platform that reviewed them cut them back sharply.
What to do
Nothing urgent. If you want to know whether chatbots mention you, ask ChatGPT and Copilot a few questions a customer would actually type about your service and your town, and note which sites they name. Check again in a month, because these citation patterns are clearly still moving.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.