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Oct 20, 2026

How easy is it to game AI search results?

Step aside, SEO. Generative engine optimization is the new game in town. Arizona State University’s Xiyang Hu explains how AI chatbot results can be manipulated.

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How easy is it to game AI search results?
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More and more people are turning to chatbots to search the web. Like the search engines of old, they rank information to determine what’s most relevant.

But researchers are finding these systems can be gamed.

One example that caught our eye involved a researcher who created a fake deodorant brand — and got ChatGPT to recommend it over real products.

We wanted to understand more about how AI chatbot search results can be manipulated, so we called up someone who studies these things for a living: Xiyang Hu, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, where he leads the Generative Learning and Augmented Decision Lab.

More on this

“Someone Hid It!'': Query-Agnostic Black-Box Attacks on LLM-Based Retrieval — a study published for the International Conference on Machine Learning

Reddit comments are 'foundational' to training AI models, COO says — from Business Insider

Language Models Often Favor Their Own Text, Revealing a New Bias in AI — NYU Center for Data Science

The Team

How easy is it to game AI search results?