Fake Deodorant Brand Fools ChatGPT Into Recommending It in Three Weeks
Three weeks after marketer Deana Burke launched a fake deodorant brand, ChatGPT and other large language models began recommending it, Inc. reports. Burke built the brand for a few dollars: a cheap domain, a three-page Vercel site, and one Substack article written with AI-generated copy. "I just spent a few bucks on tokens to see what would happen," she wrote. In some cases the chatbots ranked her invented product ahead of real brands currently in clinical trials.
Chatbot answers are becoming a real distribution channel, and Burke's experiment shows that channel can be gamed almost as cheaply as an old search-engine listing once was. A brand invented from a handful of web pages and a few dollars of AI-generated content reached the same recommendation slot as products still in clinical trials. That raises the stakes for any company relying on AI answers to reach customers: verifying what an LLM cites is becoming as important as tracking what a search engine ranks. Agencies and advertisers that measure share of voice or brand mentions in AI tools should treat those numbers with the same skepticism they would apply to an unverified review.