A team of researchers invented a research technique that doesn’t exist, complete with made-up acronyms and stats, and paid a Chinese “get your brand into AI answers” vendor $14 to promote it. Within 28 minutes the vendor had 13 posts live on sites like Sohu, Toutiao and Zhihu. Within the hour, Doubao, ByteDance’s chatbot and China’s most-used AI app (382M monthly users), was citing one of those posts and repeating the planted details back as an answer. That’s from a paper a Fudan University team just put out, “From Public Posts to AI-Search Citations” (accepted at NDSS 2027, one of the big security conferences). They wanted to know how hard it is to get stuff into AI search answers. Turns out: not very. The $14 purchase was a one-off, so treat it as an anecdote. Their controlled tests are the bigger story: They published a fake concept on sites AI engines already like to cite. 8 of 10 platforms cited it within a week, including ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity and Grok. Doubao picked it up on day one. After they deleted the posts, it kept citing them for the rest of the test. 40 posts on a regular self-hosted WordPress blog got zero citations in a week. Where you post matters way more than how much. DeepSeek was the only one that never cited any of the planted content in their main tests. And the part I didn’t expect: Chinese chatbots lean hard on their parent company’s own sites. 25.9% of Doubao’s citations went to ByteDance-owned domains, 13.5x the share those same domains got on other platforms. Baidu’s Wenxin did the same with Baidu sites (13.7x), and Tencent’s Yuanbao with Tencent sites (6.3x). Fair caveats: fake topics with zero competition are the easiest possible case, the numbers are from a spring 2026 snapshot, and the authors say clearly that this doesn’t mean any given cited page is paid. They reported everything to all 10 platforms. But it changes how I read those little source links. They look like fact-checking. Mostly they tell you which websites the engine trusts, and a lot of those let anyone with a fresh account post within minutes. So which is worse: an AI that mostly cites its parent company, or one that cites whatever got posted on Sohu an hour ago? submitted by /u/Sanbi_Ai
Originally posted by u/Sanbi_Ai on r/ArtificialInteligence