Chatbots can send SME buyers to fake retail sites
In brief
According to the intellectual property firm Podqi, in a study shared with The Verge, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity were asked shopping questions about 151 brands. Across 6,795 answers, they mentioned fake, reregistered or inactive shop sites in 4 percent of Gemini answers, 8 percent for ChatGPT and 15 percent for Perplexity. Smaller brands appeared more often than larger ones.
Source : The Verge - AI - « AI chatbots are recommending fake retail websites, study finds »
What it changes for an SME
If your teams use chatbots to find where to buy goods, they may be pointed to impersonation sites, knockoff shops or unused domains. That can waste time, lead to paying the wrong seller, or expose card and personal data. If you sell online, customers using the same tools may be sent to copycat sites instead of yours, and Podqi found this more often for smaller brands. The tests used the firm's own prompts rather than real user chats, so everyday rates may differ.
What you can do
- Tell staff who research purchases in chatbots to open only domains they already trust or that match your usual supplier checks.
- Before any payment or personal data is entered, verify the shop through a channel you control, as Podqi's CEO advised consumers to do.
- If you sell branded products, run a few of your brand-name shopping questions in the main chatbots and record any unknown domains they show.
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