作者发布5万条假数据被ChatGPT引用，揭示LLM检索与Google排名差异

Publish stats, get cited: The tactic that put my data all over the web

GEO Researcher

Oct 7, 2026

GEO Know-How

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What I learned about AI search when I made up 50,000 stats that got cited by ChatGPT...

About 7 months ago, I launched a website with 50,000 statistics. Every one of them was fake.

Google has forgotten the site exists and deindexed the pages, but ChatGPT hasn't. Since the website went live 7 months ago, it has sent more than 10,000 AI sessions its way. And now more than 330 referring domains, including Shopify, Bluehost, and DHL, link to the site. Its made-up numbers have also ended up in an academic paper and in a bank's investment research.

At Peec AI and in the industry, we talk about GEO and SEO every day, and we keep looking for new tactics. I’ve been working on this stats page one for a long time, sharing pieces of it publicly along the way. Of course, it’s experimental, but the results have been hard to ignore.

Where the idea for publishing fake statistics came from

The impetus to seed a site with statistics came out of long-running research I've been doing on LLMs, relevance engineering, and grounding (credit to the iPullRank team, Dan Petrovic, and Wil Reynolds).

In the course of my work, I noticed a pattern: as more teams write time-sensitive and breaking content with LLMs, those LLMs have to look for (seemingly) reliable data during their research to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Statistics are often exactly what they’re looking for.

Most GEO advice focuses on one moment: getting your brand into the AI answer. This experiment looks at what happens after the answer, when people take that output and use it, putting it into presentations, adding it to a shopping list, and yes, publishing it on their website.

I didn't come up with the idea for this experiment alone. Hat tip to Seer Interactive, who already published an eye-opening study in August 2025 that got a few thoughts bouncing around in my head. Several months later, those thoughts came together and finally made it to the top of my to-do list. In March 2026, I started working on building the site that would let me test my ideas.

The setup: a website and 50,000 made-up stats, created in one day

Quick context for anyone who wasn’t following along in real time as I ran this experiment:

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.

The reaction when I first shared it was wild. When my friend Kevin featured it in Growth Memo, it reached a much bigger audience. I think people responded so enthusiastically to this work because it showed great results while also speaking to the fears people have about what ends up in AI search results.

What happened

Google buried the site almost immediately

When I launched the site, traffic, indexing, and engagement were initially going really well. Using indexer tools, I got almost the entire site indexed within a week, and it started to appear in Google results.

Then two Google updates came out right after launch, and my Google visibility collapsed.

I've been invisible on Google for many months now. Indexed pages bounce between 5 and 20 impressions. At one point, I got curious and created a subdomain to see if I could increase impressions, but it didn't really help.

Other than that, I haven't touched the site. Some pages might even fail to load now and then. I don't know.

But when I sat down to write this, I checked the crawl data in Cloudflare after 7 months.

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.

Unlike Google, ChatGPT never stopped pulling from the site

And when I say, “never stopped,” I mean ChatGPT really never stopped.

After 7 months, the site now has 330+ referring domains

According to Ahrefs and Semrush, the site has links from 330+ other sites. That includes well-known brands like Shopify, DHL, and Bluehost. With strong Google performance, the numbers might have been even better.

ChatGPT is still citing it to this day

Google may have forgotten about the site, but ChatGPT clearly hasn’t. The site is still earning citations and traffic more than 7 months after launch.

If you've read Tomek's ChatGPT Index research, you're lucky, because it’s a great intro to how ChatGPT search works. If you haven't, add it to your reading list right now, because it helps explain why my website has been living in ChatGPT/OpenAI Index for so long.

A completely made-up website still performing so well is shocking. Since March, GA4 shows 10,000+ sessions from ChatGPT alone, and Cloudflare shows the site has high marks for retrieval.

I didn’t include direct sessions in overall visits, because it mostly looks like bot traffic. Remember the dead internet theory!

Right after I joined Peec in June 2026, I also set up a visibility dashboard in our tool to track a few prompts. Performance for them is still strong. On October 7, stateglobe.com was ranked second for visibility on these prompts, behind only data powerhouse Statista.

Retrieval is not ranking

The constant retrieval is the first big lesson: ranking on Google and being retrievable by an LLM are two different problems.

When ChatGPT searches, it doesn't just copy Google's top 10. It rewrites your prompt into its own sub-queries (called fanout queries), pulls candidates from its search sources and its own cache, reranks them, and then opens a handful of pages to ground the answer. A page can be invisible on Google and still perform well in every one of those LLM steps.

StateGlobe is a good example. While Google dropped it, the AI retrieval bots kept coming back.

For GEO, this means Google rankings are only one signal, not the whole picture. If you only track Google, you are missing a channel that can work even when Google says “no.”

Fake data turned into real citations

You’d expect that if a site performs well with information retrieval tools, its information would begin to appear out in the wild. And you would be right.

StateGlobe was built entirely on fake data, using the cheapest model available and a prompt that was nothing more than a list of countries and topics plus two sentences. Nevertheless, the output was…

…cited in an academic paper…

…used in investment research by Qatar's largest financial group…

…cited by an economics publication in India…

…and used as a source in a research report from a Canadian influencer community.

Note that these are only the citations that linked back to the StateGlobe site. Presumably, many more used the data without a link.

The uncomfortable implication: citation laundering

On day one, a fake number on StateGlobe had zero authority. It was a random stat on a brand-new domain.

Then an academic paper cited it. Then a bank. Now the next person, or the next model, that finds this number sees a stat with a source. And that source is cited by serious institutions.

The fake data certainly didn't become true, but every citation made it look more trustworthy.