50,000 fake stats, $50, one day: ChatGPT and Shopify still cite them 7 months later

cyoungmarketing · x · 2026-10-09

GEO researcher Metehan Yesilyurt (Peec AI) self-reports an experiment: 7 months ago he spent $50 and one day launching a site seeded with 50,000 entirely fabricated statistics. The results:

ChatGPT still cites the fake data: the site has received 10,000+ sessions from AI chats;
330+ referring domains link to it, including Shopify, Bluehost, and DHL;
The made-up numbers ended up in an academic paper and a bank's investment research;
Google deindexed the site long ago — ChatGPT hasn't.

Why: as teams write time-sensitive content with LLMs, models hunt for "seemingly reliable" data to fill knowledge gaps — statistics are exactly what they seek. Most GEO advice stops at getting your brand into the AI answer; this experiment explores what happens after, when people paste LLM output into decks, shopping lists, and their own websites.

Bottom line: AI answers are far from 100% reliable — a dirt-cheap fake can pollute model knowledge sources for months.

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