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Anyone see this press release SEO exploit before?
Posted by on November 11, 2025 at 11:36 pmI'm pretty sure my competitor is using press releases + a blackhat service to get in AI search summaries even though they aren't on the front page. I'm curious if anyone has seen this before.
Here's the background:
- There's a keyword my website ranks in the first organic spot on Google.
- For some reason my article isn't used in the AI search summary. Instead, the first spot in the search summary is a press release from fidelity about how a competing product was named a leading solution by "Experienced Consumers" (name changed to avoid promoting them). From reading the title, I thought it sounds like a consumer survey, but it's actually the reviewing website's name.
- I cannot find this press release on page 1 or 2 on Google or even in the news tab. No idea how it got lumped into the AI search summary.
- When I look up "Experienced Consumers" in ahrefs, the domain rating is 4.4 and gets almost no traffic. It was launched in October 2024.
- This company publishes a blog post like "Best Financial Software + {specific company name}," then they blast out a press release for "news" that this company has been named as a leading company by "Experienced Consumers." They seem to publish a press release for each blog post.
This "Experienced Consumers" company has published over 1,000 press releases since it launched in October 2024. Clearly it's being used for SEO reasons. Though I can't understand why this works since Google claims that PR is basically completely ignored. Maybe there's an exploit with AI search?
I'm curious if anyone else has seen this before or theories on how this works.
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1 Reply
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This is a very popular tactic for appearing in AI results. A cheap $150 press release can make it happen in a few hours.
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