AI-powered chat tools are witnessing a dual competition among companies, no longer limited to product showcases but extending to covert attempts to influence competitors' reputations online.

A report by Hard Numbers, an agency specialized in digital media analysis, revealed that many companies, especially in the customer relationship management (CRM) sector, are increasingly adopting marketing strategies that involve publishing reviews and offensive articles against competing products on their official websites, aiming to make this content a reference for chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and others.

The report observed live examples of reviews published on competitors' websites that appear in AI chatbot responses as 'neutral' information for users during the comparison process, despite originally being published by a competing company as direct marketing content.

A test conducted by the agency showed that 70% of AI chatbot responses to business software purchasing questions were influenced by content published by competing companies aiming to harm competitors' reputations or present themselves as customer favorites, in the absence of criteria to distinguish neutral sources from those biased in favor of a particular party.

While some companies defend their practices as 'comparative reviews based on customer sources and published competitor data,' experts confirm that the dominance of this content makes it more difficult to make decisions based on clear facts, amid the rising phenomenon of writing content specifically targeting AI systems rather than the human reader.

Lily Ray, founder of Algorythmic, a technical consultancy, believes that AI chatbots have become a new arena for widespread promotional exploitation and spam, pointing to mutual offers between companies to include a competitor's name in trusted lists in exchange for reciprocal treatment, creating a kind of 'promotional coexistence' on web pages without effective intervention from regulators so far.

Scientific study warns of AI models' role in reinforcing delusional ideas. This concern comes amid the growing use of chatbots as a primary source of information and purchasing channels, as ChatGPT alone has surpassed 900 million weekly users, while Google continues to increase its reliance on AI results in its search engine.

For her part, Luan Sinnamon from the University of British Columbia points out that the challenges of spam and result credibility that search engines have suffered from for years have not yet been adequately addressed within new AI systems, prompting companies to write to influence algorithms rather than genuinely engage with the end user.

Experts warn that much of the content now circulating is not aimed at providing accurate information to the user, but rather seeks to indirectly influence their decisions through AI chatbots.