Study: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity recommend fake retail sites

A study by IP protection firm Podqi found that ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity all cited or displayed risky retail websites when answering shopping questions about 151 brands. Podqi defined risky sites as fake storefronts impersonating real retailers or selling knockoffs, old brand domains reregistered by someone else, or dead sites someone else could buy and reuse. Across 6,795 answers collected in two September testing periods, Perplexity surfaced risky sites in 15 percent of responses, ChatGPT in 8 percent and Gemini in 4 percent. ChatGPT warned about the risky site it surfaced 24 percent of the time. Queries about smaller brands produced risky sites about twice as often as those about larger companies, and prompts about regional brand websites triggered them more frequently; Perplexity once named the wrong page as Stüssy's official site. Podqi said the answers came from the logged-out consumer versions of the three services, collected with Gauge, an AI search company that helps brands appear in more AI answers.

Generated from reports · updated 12 h ago

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