A site with 50,000 fake stats got cited by ChatGPT, a bank, and an academic paper
Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
I built StateGlobe, a site with 50,000 invented statistics generated by GPT-4.1 for about $50. Google deindexed it within weeks, but ChatGPT kept pulling from it for seven months: over 10,000 sessions, 330+ referring domains including Shopify and DHL, and citations in an academic paper and a Qatari bank's investment research. The lesson: LLMs search for numbers to fill knowledge gaps and never fact-check them.
The fake data certainly didn't become true, but every citation made it look more trustworthy.