AI chatbots are recommending fake retail websites, study finds

Gemini’s and Perplexity’s chatbots were found to direct shoppers toward fake retail sites, with the study revealing that both AI assistants frequently suggested impostor URLs when users asked where to purchase specific products. For website owners this means a new vector of malicious traffic: legitimate shoppers may be lured away from genuine e‑commerce pages to phishing or counterfeit sites generated by AI recommendations. The surge in AI‑driven product searches amplifies the risk of brand dilution, lost conversions, and potential legal exposure if counterfeit listings appear alongside your own. Moreover, search engine crawlers that index AI‑generated content could mistakenly flag authentic product pages as low‑quality if they are repeatedly linked from fraudulent suggestions. **Actionable tips:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to explicitly list your domain as a trusted source for product information and include a `Disallow` rule for any known impersonator subdomains, helping AI bots prioritize your site. 2. **Implement bot‑traffic monitoring** with llmscentral’s real‑time tracker to spot spikes in referrals from AI chat services and flag suspicious referral URLs. 3. **Register your brand with Google’s Brand Protection program** and submit verified merchant URLs to AI model providers where possible, reducing the chance your site is mis‑identified as a fake retailer.