Beware: This Is How Big Brands Are Gaming AI To Win Search
In an article published by The Atlantic, writer Will Oremus outlines a frustrating new shift in how the internet works: your search results are getting sloptimised. For the past quarter-century, businesses used Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to manipulate Google’s algorithms and land their links at the top of a results page. Now, as traditional search engines lose ground to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s own AI Overviews, the marketing industry is pivoting to a new frontier: Generative-Engine Optimisation (GEO). The goal is no longer to catch a human reader’s eye, but to trick the bots that scrape and summarise the web.
The strategies behind this transition are blunt. Here’s one example: Shopify has published dozens of ranked listicles with titles like 10 Best eCommerce Platforms for Small Business. Naturally, Shopify ranks itself as number one every time. Because major AI models struggle to separate an independent third-party review from self-promotional content, they scrape these biased listicles and parrot the recommendations back to users as objective facts. Other companies, like ClickUp, have flooded the web with hundreds of similar self-serving lists to ensure bots favour them.
When businesses aren't writing the lists themselves, they are manipulating the forums that AI models trust most. Bots heavily rely on user-generated platforms like Reddit and Wikipedia for hyper-specific queries. Marketers have quickly caught on, hiring networks of mercenary accounts to plant favourable mentions of specific brands across relevant discussion threads. If a product gets mentioned enough times by what looks like real people, the AI assumes it is highly recommended and passes that bias along to the next user.
This ecosystem creates a toxic feedback loop. AI search engines incentivise companies to fill the web with spammy, self-promotional content, which the AI then consumes and regurgitates as truth. While some tech platforms are starting to decouple their citations from actual recommendations, the financial stakes are simply too high for marketers to stop. Shopify’s own data showed an eightfold year-over-year increase in traffic referred by AI bots. Ultimately, the web is being aggressively redesigned around what a bot rewards, rather than what human readers actually need.
The lesson here is simple. Blindly trusting AI-curated recommendations is a massive trap. When bots serve as the ultimate source of information, the loudest and most manipulative marketing engines win the digital real estate. For businesses, relying purely on algorithmic search visibility is becoming a race to the bottom of the spam pile. To survive this shift, building direct, trusted channels to your audience, free from the distortion of both Google and the bots, is no longer just an alternative strategy; it is the only way to protect your brand's integrity.
