A marketer's website of 50,000 invented statistics still earns ChatGPT visits and links months later, a reminder to check any number AI hands you.
A marketer built a website of 50,000 statistics that were all made up, and ChatGPT is still citing it seven months later. The site, stateglobe.com, cost about $50 to build with AI in one day. Google dropped it. ChatGPT did not.
The author, who works at the AI search firm Peec AI, used GPT-4.1 to generate the pages in a single day. They covered topics like SEO, social media and e-commerce across 200 countries. Every number was invented, and none were checked. The first pages cost about $30. Later, 15,000 list articles added about $20 more.
The author also says the fake figures showed up in an academic paper and in a bank's investment research. That claim comes from the author and is not independently checked here.
Google's visibility for the site collapsed after two updates that followed launch. Indexed pages now get only 5 to 20 impressions. But ChatGPT works differently. It rewrites a question into several smaller searches, pulls candidate pages, ranks them, then opens a few to build its answer. A page can be invisible on Google and still pass every one of those steps.
The author notes that the 72,000 requests came from the agent that opens a page while answering a real person's question. They were not routine data collection for training.
Anyone who asks an AI tool for a statistic and pastes it into a presentation, a grant application, a report or a blog post. Once a made-up number is published, others can cite it, and the chain grows. The experiment shows that a site with no real data can still look like a trusted source to an AI tool.
It is not yet known how often ChatGPT repeats these invented numbers to everyday users, or whether OpenAI plans changes. The test is also one person's experiment, run by someone who sells tools in this field.
Before you use a statistic from an AI answer, find the original source yourself, because a made-up number can look just as convincing as a real one.
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