By Thomas Germain
Publication Date: 2026-02-18 10:00:00
I asked multiple times to see how the answers changed and get other people to do the same. Gemini didn’t bother to say where it got the information from. All the other AIs linked to my article, although they rarely mentioned that I was the only source on the topic on the entire internet. (OpenAI says ChatGPT always includes links when searching the web so you can investigate the source.)
“Anyone can do it. It’s stupid, it feels like there are no guardrails there,” says Harpreet Chatha, who runs SEO consultancy Harps Digital. “You can write an article on your own website about ‘The Best Waterproof Shoes for 2026.’ You simply rank your own brand at number one and other brands at number two to six, and your page will likely be cited on Google and ChatGPT.”
People have been using hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of its AI overviews is comparable to other search features it introduced years ago. But…
