If I recall correctly, there were some papers which suggested that LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones. I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :) I've also experienced that both Claude and Codex routinely include generated websites when I ask them to search for something. It also doesn't help that the web search tools that OAI and Anthropic have are deeply limiting: can't exclude keywords or domains.
Well it's not only this, or protection from LLMs training on LLM output. LLMs training on human output is also problematic.
I was traveling to an obscure small town, doing some "research" with LLMs beforehand. Every and each one told me enthusiastically to go to "Foobar square" (name changed) for the "best street food in XYZ town", some added a lot of colorful details.
There was no Foobar square in XYZ town. There was no Foobar square anywhere in the world. There was a SINGLE old Reddit comment, with no upvotes, to a unpopular post in an unpopular subreddit, where someone clearly badly misspelled the name of the square, and said something like "for street food go to Foobar square". Nothing about "the best" even.
It's all a lie.
I think this was a common game on city/town subs. It happened here, there was a post asking for a good restaurant and someone just made up a name. It went viral and people started posting made-up menus for the place, reviews, and for a couple of months any time someone asked about a restaurant this fictional place would get mentioned.
It was all done as a joke to see if they could get Gemini or ChatGPT to start recommending it.
The Montréal subreddit has been doing this for ages before LLMs were a thing because every summer and fall there's endless threads from tourists and students asking the same questions that recommending a local gay bathhouse became the meme answer.
I've had gemini claiming code would compile and run while also outputting the same variable in the same sniplet with "fork" "frok" and "fokr" in the name. I'm not surprized it's trained on garbadge.
I used one of the 12-month free Perplexity offers when they were everywhere. It felt slightly useful at first for simple queries where I didn’t want to go through the top 10 Google results manually. If I was looking for a specific recipe I remembered or a help page or user manual it would usually find it quickly.
Then they started optimizing for speed of responses over quality of results. I can enter a query and see my results appear in a second, but they’re garbage. The links and references it gives frequently don’t match the text right next to them. It feels like someone had a KPI to make responses as fast as possible and they optimized for that above all else.
They added a “Computer” option that’s supposed to do research for you. Half the time I can’t get it to trigger through the UI. Pressing the submit button doesn’t work. When I can get it to trigger, most of those sessions will work for a while and then just stop before an answer comes back.
The only reason I keep using it is to keep observing a company that has been heavily marketed and hyped, which should have had a market leading position for something. Even non-technical people I know who listen to Joe Rogan (where Perlexity is advertising heavily, I’m told) are asking me about it.
Now there are reports of people being billed at the end of their trial period without warning, despite them saying that they will warn before this happens. There are some alarmingly bad customer support screenshots where the customer support agent (AI? Probably) acknowledges that they didn’t send the email they promised but refuse to help anyway. It takes escalating it on Twitter to get it corrected.
If I want to do actual research or AI assisted web searching I have Claude or ChatGPT do it. The results are so much higher quality and it does exactly what I ask. It may take 45 seconds instead of the instant response from Perplexity but I save time overall because the response and links are more likely to be correct
I paid for perplexity pro for 3 years. I genuinely enjoyed using it and felt it was better overall than ChatGPT etc due to the way it showed sources etc. I liked being able to use different models depending on what I was looking for, and the deep research was helpful.
I think they probably damaged themselves by going for a land grab of user base through freebies. It meant the users weren’t ever going to convert to paid customers, so it was more to show investors that they had a user base. But, with an increased base of users who weren’t paying, it then meant they needed to find either new revenue streams or cheaper ways to provide the service. Unfortunately, it seems they went with the new revenue streams whilst also decreasing the functions paying members were able to access (something I find quite abhorrent- I paid a service level, but then they change what I receive mid-subscription). And then computer - rammed down my throat. One reason I pay for pro is to stop the nagging noise of paid tiers. And instead, they actually created a way of logging in and continually seeing gated functions.
So, after paying them upwards of $400-$500 and being a loyal customer, I walked.
I use perplexity simply to avoid underlying vendor lock in.
Perplexity really fell off for me, especially the free version. Their syntax highlighting stopped working, and even the fonts seemed messed up. You could tell they were mixing and matching whatever the cheapest model was because the sources would be messed up and printed as plane text <grok source 1 http:// ... />
I guess it makes sense though, unless you've got the lowest pricing on your own model how can you compete.
If they had some sort of tier that was like $5 to $10 and the main thing it had on it was their custom model for research, no other model, I might re-subscribe, but they were definitely burning way too much compute trying to give it away in the hopes others kept their subscription. I was using it to trim down on my direct Claude Compute usage since they ran me unmetered for a while.
I would draft a development plan with Claude on there, then feed it to Claude Code. This isn't sustainable, but given that I had x number of months pre-paid for, I just used it.
I’ve personally found that Google’s AI mode is surprisingly capable and almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher too to match its seeming over-responsiveness. Which means Perplexity in effect doesn’t have anything to differentiate it.
I don't notice it's hallucinations (in the sense of making up answers) so much as where it's simply wrong. For example, earlier in the week, I was working with product X, and since the original vendor of X doesn't really support it any more, I asked "who else sells product X under their own brand", and Google AI quickly told me that noone else sells product X, that it was full of proprietary tech and quickly devolved into replaying product X marketing spiel. Except...I knew that at least one other vendor did sell product X, only difference is paint job. After too much "no, you're wrong..." and "Yes, you're right...", it finally coughed up that there were 2 other vendors that sold it. And if I didn't already know about another vendor, I probably would still be putzing around with poor support and little documentation.
I was one of the people that used the free Pro tier for a year and it is still my go to app when I want to quickly check something and have some sources linked, but I agree that over that year the quality of linked sources dropped significantly. But at least I got noticed when my trial period was near the end, so they either learned, or I was lucky.
I do think models currently don't have enough source skepticism.
If you look at agent traces when asked to compare two options to help inform a decision, many of the comparison pages cited in research are often hosted by one of the companies being compared; nearly all are AI-generated AEO plays. Not deeply considering the motive of published information is currently a glitch that can be exploited, but the window will close.
I'm sure model providers will set up some crappy pay for play verification system for "trusted" product information, comparisons, and reviews.
Yes 100%. I see this all the time. You’re asking about a product and the LLM will cite a source from a competitor where the competitor will review the source and list a few positives about the product but lots of negatives. Then the LLM uses them in the response. So cheeky
It's difficult to read more than a few sentences, when this itself is clearly a Claude artifact.
Agreed, I thought the subject matter was interesting enough to try and labour through the tedious prose, but once I got to "Their scale is the point." I just had to stop and just skim the rest.
And here's the rub: it's not just you who had to stop, lots of readers had to stop. You are not alone in this and were absolutely right to point this out. But alone or not, you did you, and that's the point.
There's also the irony that this AI written piece criticizes how low the domains are on the tranco list when trellner.com doesn't even make the list, haha.
Look at the posters recent posts, these are 4 very similar AI sites, all similarly (badly) written by AI. I'm surprised his submissions aren't flagged.
If you turn on [showdead] the submission history looks even more unnatural. The account seems to be mostly self-promotional or marketing of some sort.
What is Jakob's end game, to chase clout or get a job out or this?
As Jakob says on his own site:
The bar is shockingly low You’re competing against people who barely care and barely try
Weird, there are 2 negative articles on the HN front page right now about Perplexity, both from “research” sites that are clearly LLM slop themselves.
Both by the same poster? Check out his other recent posts...
Indeed. A google/brave search on that founder generated nada.
Pretty sure that OP ("jakobgreenfeld") is the "founder". That user's last four submissions have all been similar "finding" reports from a Claude-generated mystery research group website.
Perplexity is about to learn that Google is an anti-spam company first, search engine second
Well, was. They did a bad job of it these last few years which allowed any AI that could crawl the web to seem amazing for search because it could pick the best posts from Reddit or whatever other forum had the best context for your question, but now we're watching the AI snake eat its own tail.
Hard to conclusively beat spam when your primary means of making money is selling the very ads that the spammers are using to make money.
Theoretically, Goggle doesn't care which websites run their ads, so they might as well give you the most useful ones. Search doesn't really work for engagementmaxxing.
This is like suggesting you can show people more ads by keeping them in line at the DMV for longer. Try that at your peril. People aren't at the DMV to waste time and there's a reason the DMV is hated.
heh reminds me how every app lets you report ads as "spam" still but in this day what is even the difference?
I rarely use image search, but I went to look something up recently and I was shocked at how many obviously AI generated images showed up. I couldn't even find an image of the thing I was looking for and eventually gave up. Bing has the same problem.
Eh.. Using page rank in 2026 is like using a bow and arrow in 1918
What protection do LLM search engines have against training off content generated by other LLMs?
Will we get to a point where AI-generated sites make up a majority of the internet, and LLMs are training upon their own regurgitations, with exponential amplification of all their lies and flaws?
Or will the pre-2022 corpus human knowledge be considered the low-background steel standard, and anything after that less and less reliable unless certified that it has been created by a human mind and untainted by hallucinations?
I have a feeling we're already there.
The weird babbling reported from Opus 5 might be a result of either a bad system prompt or bad training data.
Will we get to a point where AI-generated sites make up a majority of the internet
I dunno if they'll be the majority (I suspect we're alredy close to 'yes, and it's already happened'), but I feel very, very confident that they will be the majority, if not the totality, of sites that the vast majority of people see.
> What protection do LLM search engines have against training off content generated by other LLMs?
You're talking about a scenario that won't blow itself up in the next few quarters, so it's of no interest to them.
I've mostly stopped using the Internet to learn new things and have gone back to books from the library. The majority of technical books at the library were published pre-2020s and hopefully, publishing slop physically won't be profitable enough to flood that market, too. Now that the Internet has largely been destroyed by slop manufacturers, whether or not the words are(/were) worth putting on paper becomes a useful discriminator.
They’ll train on prompts and anything else you send in. Many LLM responses are sorta finger printable: I assume this is intentional
"Sharing a nameserver pair is strong circumstantial evidence of a common Cloudflare account rather than proof of ownership"
-when you read one statement that let's you know to believe no other assertions in the article....
I've been vary of using ai to search considering all the spam out there. I think I'd rather, perhaps naively, whitelist wikipedia, reddit, arxiv, some news sources, etc than include everything.
Is there nothing out there that does this? I'm paying for kagi and I can see that it has an api, is that maybe sufficient if configured properly?
If you use Kagi Assistant, you can pick one of your lenses (i.e. lists of domains to restrict searches to) in chats. Not sure if their API has that as well or some other way to restrict searches. Also not sure if the Assistant (or API) respects blocked domains when searching.
Yes, the API supports lenses. You can use your account’s Kagi lenses or configure new ones: https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/search/search#search/searc...
Same thing with your domain ranks, you can have the API key inherit your account’s existing ranks (blocked, pinned, etc domains) or configure new ones https://kagi.com/api/docs/openapi/search/search#search/searc...
Another reason Kagi is worth paying for.
I direct them to search for discussion on fora. There are still legacy sites on niche topics that the bots don't post in. This is particulaly useful for reaching into the past because traditional search doesn't surface anything but new content.
Reddit is full of ai accounts now tho
Begun, the AI SEO wars have.
It does seem rather impactful.
I've seen an extremely aggressive uptick in API key requests and sales that I'm not sure where it's coming from. Like it's up 5x over the summer. Been a bit confused about this since I do basically zero traditional marketing or SEO, but I think it's AI search tools that's suggesting my services.
Has the industry already started to search for a better name than AI SEO for this?
Yes GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is one I've seen around.
I propose “sloptimizing”
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
GEO seems to be winning, Generative Engine Optimization.
This is genius. The AI/LLM singularity has arrived, and it is shaped like a snake eating its own tail (ouroboros) [1] (or a pelican riding a bicycle).
[1] https://www.newsbiscuit.com/post/ouroboros-unclear-if-it-s-e...
This is a problem we experience with our own niche SaaS product. We have been in business for about 10 years, but asking any LLM about recommendations in this niche will not mention our tool at all. If we ask ”why don’t you meantion X” - they say that ”oh, X is also a very reputable and good candidate”
Some of those ”best software sites” has reached out to us with an offer where we can then pay them an annual fee depending on which position we would like.
It feels so wrong - will this continue or will the LLMs learn to ignore them?
Something similar happened to me, a few months after refusing the "offer" that same site had an article mentioning our product but it was all fabricated negative stuff.
> The result covers Perplexity only. We have not measured ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Google’s AI Mode
Why only test Perplexity...? Isn't it the least popular among these?
I assume because promising trustworthiness by sourcing information from the web is specifically Perplexity's shtick. The fact that this study undermines the quality of random web sources hits Perplexity's value proposition the most.
Cool, but, uh, this seems really astroturfed? Why are there two anti-Perplexity articles from independent research firms with identical websites on the front-page of HN right now, submitted by the same person? Feels like they should get deleted
The irony of this article being fully AI generated...
Anyway, it's over for Perplexity. They never had a great a product and the only reason for using them, was when they offered Pro accounts for free. Many people joined. Me included. But with a "meh" product and the general AI business not being very sticky, they lost quite harshly.
I thought they might be able to make money as a search api/index, but this article closed the book.
They were way above their main competition at the time Google decided to ignore the entire open web but they were still focused on searching it.
Since then, they decided to change focus into answering questions, and didn't maintain the quality of search results.
AI;DR
Yea. A google on that founder generated zero results.
Searching for products has become impossible. If you don't already know what you are looking for, you're screwed.
What do you expect? "Best X" is the most spammed category of all spammed categories.
If you let a plain llm search the internet with no guidance, it's basically a string matcher with no concept of quality. I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?
I thought perplexity's whole point was being good at search?
Yes, and the whole point of the OP is they aren't.
The search engine is now the citation, and the citation is a page that exists to be cited. Nobody in that loop has read anything, and it still works.
Honestly, I will just flag every post that is entirely AI slop from now on. This has to stop.
The home page for this "independent research firm" is also 100% nonsense [1]. "The record a machine reads is not the one a company writes.". Ironically this low-effort spam is exactly what this report warns about, and does not belong in HN - or anywhere else.
Also, that user's last four (three of them in the last hour) submissions have all been similar "finding" reports from a Claude-generated mystery research group website. All which contain exclusively AI slop articles. Ugh.
Interesting. They posted this not long ago: https://jakobgreenfeld.com/smart-web/
I speculate pretty soon they won't even bother with a website meatbags can browse to. It'll all be fed by links to links to api endpoints that stream training data to push models in the desired direction.
Makes sense. Manipulating training data so that models will recommend your product is undoubtedly a big industry.
It's DecorMyEyes for a new generation of tech.
my friend works for a company called 'profound' whose whole job is 'get found by ai' by spamming reddit and other talk sites ( among other things)
They've raised $155M total now with the latest at a $1B valuation [1] from Lightspeed, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla, and NVIDIA.
And very impressive list of angels too: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Andrew Karam (AppLovin) among others
Last I heard they're trying to reposition from AEO/GEO to "AI Marketer". No clue how that's going, I feel like the AEO/GEO stuff isn't super defensible at that valuation if for no other reason than I assume (hope) the spamming stops working.
[1] https://dealroom.co/news/126181-profound-raises-96m-at-1b-va...
SEO companies were already doing this. There were already tools applying ML to the problem before LLMs too, that would recommend places you could post relevant content, like Reddit, yahoo answers (lmao), quora, etc.
An SEO tale as old as time
Spam and slop from a hacked account, like the other last two posts from the submitter.
Who could have seen this coming?
I'm just about getting by with DDG and a curated 'AI slop' list subscription in uBlock origin.
The state of search has been dire for quite some time.
- in 2026.
So we're up to "circular reasoning". Bogus citations meant to appear as legit citations to juice up LLMs to show that a particular POV is the correct POV.
None of what we're doing with tech these days is something we should be doing.
ugh. so hard to read these ai generated articles. am I the only one? and am I supposed to put my agent in front to read it, which just introduces noise - didn't anyone learn from that "telephone" game we played as children?
You don't get accurate signals asking an AI to represent your prose and another AI to understand it.
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The other day, I remember an article was posted to HN about something, but it came from a company that provides SEO services to companies by doing something like this:
1. For a given company, analyze their target audiences and the questions they are likely to ask LLMs about.
2. For each such question, ask it to each of the major LLMs, and compute the KL divergence between the pages they want to rank for the question vs. the LLM's response.
3. Rewrite the article to minimize said KL divergence.
In effect, they're performing an iterative optimization of some sort that moves the embedding space of their article closer to the question asked to the LLM, and any embedding model or generated responses are going to prefer said responses over others.
I believe we will keep seeing more of this stuff.
And it's all because of ads. The incentives in an ad-funded internet are just always going to lead to this sort of thing. The most important thing is getting the user to load your page, not actually satisfying their query.
Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits, because any that move to ad revenue will become useless for real work.
> Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits
LLM vendors make this hard because you can't trust them with your session data. Yesterday you were opted out of training, then suddenly today you're opted in.
It's an extension of the idea that they don't need to care about anybody's copyright. They don't care about preserving the security or privacy of customer data, because there is negligible incentive to do so.
For now, there's no substitute but as LLMs get commoditized trusting LLM SAAS vendors becomes an unacceptable business risk.
But don't you want Technojesus to come save you from never having learned how to invert a binary tree?
> And it's all because of ads.
Not really. A while ago there was a news piece stating that Israel was behind a series of fake think-tanks with very accessible websites which were created with the express purpose of feeding AI agents with alternative facts aligned with their foreign policy.
If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
Thank you.
Past HN discussions
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337392 (884 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313477
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49447600
Some of us have been predicting this for a while.
People with an axe to grind or states with an agenda are already devoting tremendous effort toward affecting LLM models and it is very difficult to determine real from astroturf for humans let alone an LLM trying to train.
Much like PageRank now that the cat's out of the bag all the current approaches may prove to be useless in the long run.
Sure maybe, but the online ad market is USD 400b give or take, which vastly outmatches any such budgets.
It's just incentives in general. Humans are self-motivated creatures, and in the absence of meaningful consequences they'll often do what they're incentivized to do, even if it harms others.
The internet is uniquely devoid of consequences (esp. reputational consequences, social faux pas, etc.) and makes effort expenditure minimal. So you get lots of bad behavior.
I think "ads vs not ads" is maybe the wrong way to model it. Ultimately people are just doing what benefits themselves across every dimension possible.
There are incentives other than marketing, but I doubt the SEO company referred to by the ancestor comment is planning to do lots of business in the political propaganda space.
You wrote "not really" and then described a literal ad.
That sounds very plausible too. Propaganda/spin has always been a component of mass media.
>If anyone has the link at hand, please post it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank...
Same difference tbh
There is a term for the general practice of optimizing responses called GEO - Generative Engine Optimization [0]. A cousin of SEO and equally unsavory in how trust is being eroded through info shaping. Self-discovery by individuals is the victim.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
Take a random essay and add in a bunch of the phrases that LLMs love like “load-bearing,” “crucial,” structural,” and “woven,” and then submit the original and the edited version to an LLM and ask which is better. It will choose the second one virtually every time. They have ingrained biases that associate those words with good writing and arguments.
This is why using other LLMs as scorers for benchmarks and evaluations is such a bad idea, they'll have preferences you can't anticipate and won't understand immediately.
> I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful. It always picks its own :)
A better question to ask for each snippet is "Estimate the seniority and competence of the developer who wrote the following code, ignoring bugs that linters or LLMs can catch and focus only on structure, maintainability, logical layout and readability."
It almost always estimates the author of my code as above the author of it's own code.
If by root urls you mean domains, openai at least supports this.
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-web-sear...
That is what I meant! Couldn't remember the word 'domain' while I was writing out my comment. Thank you
I don't have an oai subscription to try, but I'd be interested to know if Codex picks Claude's code over a human's and vice versa.
A bit different, but one thing I’ve seen is models repackaging Reddit slop. Like, it will do a search, find a Reddit thread somewhat related where someone in a comment casually mentioned incorrect information that any human would have dismissed. The model takes that as granted, but expands on it and present it as a well established fact, presented in a very plausible fashion.
In general I don’t find models to be good at evaluating the quality of a source :(
Newspapers have been doing this for a long time, notably the Metro in London.
i actively assume it is worse since, for example, spez signed a 60 million dollar deal to give Google access to the firehose. so then if you have niche, highly engaged subreddits infested by AI bots creating posts, then commenting on posts, then being trained on that content... you have Ouroburos eating its own poop, and models have less then zero incentive to evaluate the quality of a source, especially if they are the source
>It always picks its own
Makes sense to me, in that its own output would align closer to its own training set
I was giving local models a try recently, I think it was Qwen 3.6 I was trying at the time. I gave it a codebase and just asked it to review it. Its main feedback was that the comments and documentation were excellently written, but they were all Opus 5 slop.
OMG if this is true, do you realize what this means? The easiest way to do AI SEO is to generate all your content with AI, and we've seen what SEO does to the web...
The Internet is doomed. Time to start some human-only darknets.
SEO is what ruined the web AFAIC.
> Time to start some human-only darknets.
I know very little about darknets. How could you ensure that they are human-only?
> always picks its own
If you hate AI writing enough, this turns AI filters into a kind of humiliation ritual. AI will derank normal business writing for human readers, and uprank inflated, verbose, tic-heavy slop. So you have to put the heavy slop out with your name on it. Really perverse moment.
disagree that there is one kind of ranking and one kind of engine analyzing that ranking; sort of de-facto true that one company does run the ad world; strongly agree that this is a nightmare possibility and directly dystopian
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> asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored [...] It always picks its own
...is not the same as claiming...
> LLMs favor LLM-generated passages over human written ones
Here, you're using the same LLM to both produce and judge the resulting work. If anything, I would expect an LLM to tend to prefer its own work given that the same training is producing and judging.
It's not intuitive to me for why preference for its own writing would emerge, and during what type of training or tuning.
Perhaps something like: learning to identify what source files it has worked on by the code style alone, because tasks may give human code (public repos, etc) and ask to make changes.
It’s optimizing for good writing. Therefore, it believes its outputs are good. Therefore, it believes inputs that look like its outputs are good.
It would need to be researched, but I wonder if it ends up being something that happens at the token level?
If that were true I would expect to see prose that more closely resembles the "caveman" messages found in the HuggingFace attack than the overly flowery nonsense we see in AI blogspam.
Well, the one it generated is based on how it thought the best way to solve the problem was.
I am sure most humans would pick code written in their style, too.
> I can consistently reproduce this by asking Claude which code snippet it prefers: the one it generated in a different chat, or one that I refactored for my own needs and find more useful.
Interesting. For me I've noticed it tends to do the opposite.