this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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404 media has an interesting podcast episode on “AEO” (AI SEO) and how it can be manipulated. Apple link
So it's like SEO then. It's always been a scammers game. Blast sites with bot comments about your site, write slop articles that merge things that have nothing to do with what they are named for the sake of SEO, add tags, and specific words through the page. This is just an extension of the scum.
SEO started the day after the first search engine, with sysops begging other sysops to list their boards on the front page of links. It has evolved massively since then, but manipulation of AI results is just another form of SEO, and the AI results we have today are already heavily influenced by the SEOed content they were trained on and that they RAG from.
In fairness, the difference between surfacing helpful information vs. manipulating misinformation is the desire of the users for that information. If it turns out to be something they really wanted, it's a Good Thing™. If it turns out to be not something they really wanted, it's a Bad Thing™.
One of the reasons dealing with manipulation is so difficult.
Well, the cynical take is: if the information is being published to influence readers' / viewers' / listeners' opinions in order to enrich the publishers... then that information is much more likely to be mis-information, or distorted information as opposed to unbiased truth (whatever that is...)
I worked for a struggling little video processing company for a short while around 2012. On the floor underneath us was a big and growing company with twice our square footage and three times our headcount - their whole business: internet reputation polishing. Want to make your company, or yourself, or your dog more appealing to the general public via the internet? These manipulators would, for a fee, put good stuff about whatever you wanted as many places as possible. They would endeavor to remove or just overwhelm information that created negative impressions. Erase things you published and now regret, including copies of those things spread far and wide.
I've seen celebrity blogs (Scott Adams, among others) which shared things they were going through, then a couple of years later decide that they don't want that information "out there" anymore and it disappears from everywhere, including the internet archive and similar supposed long term repositories of "what the web used to say." Many stories about embarassing things that police officers did, like the Miami Dade cops who stopped off at Dunkin Donuts - in the County Police Helicopter - on their way back to base. That story lasted on the internet for about 10 years before it disappeared. Used to be simple to find with any search engine, now it's no longer acknowledged as ever having happened. We lived across the street from the owner/operators of the Dunkin location it happened at, they're the ones who originally told me about it, it was covered in multiple newspapers and copied into all kinds of personal blogs... now: gone.