In other words, we should all just create websites with listicals, fake stats, and then watch the genAI burn from misinformation?

You got it boss!

TLDR - chatpgt got gamed by itself, as it saw the raw number of statistics and listicles listed on the page and absorbed absolutely everything.

I bought a brand-new domain, stateglobe.com, and generated 50,000 statistics pages in a single day with GPT-4.1. The site purports to provide stats on SEO, content marketing, social media, e-commerce, and web technology from 200 countries. Except every number was totally invented. I never checked a single one. I pushed them to the site with a basic AI web design template. This cost me around $30. Later, I added 15,000 listicles on top of the statistics. That was about $20 more, so all in all, this is an experiment that came in at the very low price of about $50.

[7 months later] In the last 30 days alone, the site got more than 600,000 requests from bots. Around 72,000 of them came from ChatGPT-User. That is the agent ChatGPT uses to open a page in real time while answering someone. So these are not training crawls. Each one is ChatGPT fetching a fake statistics page to answer a real question.

On October 7, stateglobe.com was ranked second for visibility on these prompts, behind only data powerhouse Statista.