Researcher Seeds Web With 50K Fake Stats, Gets Cited by ChatGPT
Original: Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
Why This Matters
Shows LLMs actively amplify misinformation when trained on stat-heavy SEO bait.
GEO researcher Metehan Yesilyurt created stateglobe.com with 50,000 fabricated statistics for ~$50. Google deindexed it; ChatGPT kept citing it, driving 10,000+ AI sessions and 330+ backlinks from Shopify, Bluehost, and DHL.
Metehan Yesilyurt, a GEO researcher at Peec AI, launched stateglobe.com in March 2026 as a deliberate experiment: 50,000 entirely fabricated statistics across SEO, e-commerce, and social media topics, covering 200 countries. Every number was invented. Total cost: roughly $50, using GPT-4.1 to generate content and a basic AI web design template.
Google initially indexed the site, then buried it after two algorithm updates. It now receives between 5 and 20 impressions per indexed page. But AI search engines never got the memo. ChatGPT continues to cite the fake data, generating over 10,000 AI-driven sessions. More than 330 domains now link to the site, including Shopify, Bluehost, and DHL. The fabricated numbers have also surfaced in an academic paper and a bank's investment research report.
Yesilyurt's central observation: LLMs filling knowledge gaps during content generation actively seek out statistics-heavy pages, treating them as authoritative sources regardless of accuracy. He framed this as a downstream GEO problem — not just about appearing in an AI answer, but about what happens when users take that AI output and republish it elsewhere, spreading bad data further. The experiment builds on earlier work by Seer Interactive published in August 2025.