Search engine poisoning
Search engine poisoning is when attackers push harmful pages up the search results so people click them and get scammed or infected.
Search engine poisoning is when attackers get harmful pages to rank in search results, so that people looking for something ordinary click through to a scam, a fake download or a page that installs malware. The pages are built to look like the real thing, and they're often timed to catch searches that spike, like a big news story or a popular product launch.
It matters to a marketer because your brand name is a target. People searching for your login page, your support number or your latest product are exactly who an attacker wants to reach.
How it works
The attacker needs pages that rank for the searches people make. They might build lots of throwaway sites stuffed with the right words, break into real sites with good rankings and hide pages on them, or buy links to push their pages up. Google treats hacked pages and these tricks as spam in its spam policies, and its guide to hacked sites explains how to spot them on your own.
For example, someone could publish a page called "Harrow & Pine customer service number" with a fake phone line. A customer who calls it hands their order details to a stranger, and blames Harrow & Pine.
The AI version
The same idea now aims at AI answers. If an AI platform searches the web and reads a poisoned page, it can repeat what that page says, sometimes with a link to it. A fake support number in an answer is more convincing than one in a list of results, because the platform seems to vouch for it.
There's no switch that protects you. What helps is making the true version easy to find: your real contact details on your own site, in plain text, and the same everywhere you're listed.
In AnswerOrbit
Add your contact details and other facts that must be right in Claims. We check what every answer says about you against them, and show you the sentence when an answer contradicts one, along with the pages the answer used. Recommendations can then suggest you report answers that repeat a wrong claim to the platform.