Recently I decided to try various AI chatbots to see if they could recommend what they felt were the best companies to hire for various services. At first I didn’t really see anything unusual as it simply listed businesses that you would expect to pop up even through manual searching. With that said, it didn’t really sound like the AI had the ability to truly determine if one company was better than the other versus just scraping listing information.
That’s what led to my other observation where for a particular industry that I was knowledgeable of I was wondering why one company kept coming up at the top for recommendations. From what I saw anyways, they didn’t do anything crazy such as winning a prestigious award to be listed first by the AI bot. What appeared to have happened is that the company actually flooded various websites with information about their business plus those who were affiliated with the business would have social media accounts just posting random stuff.
Because of that, the AI bot would constantly scrape data from various sites that talk about the company where in-turn it looked like that company was the most talked about online. Giving it a boost in ranking. This is especially true for platforms that use only content on its own site to train the bots. If no one specifically talks about it to generate information for the AI bot to evaluate then it will be as if the company never existed. Imagine that where just posting random stuff of where you ate like an influencer can actually be an important way to get notice by AI bots nowadays it seems.