Israel's Foreign Ministry Is Running a $145M Campaign Explicitly Targeting What ChatGPT Says, Via Sites Built for AI Crawlers Not Readers
Politico Influence reported 2026-08-14 (69 points on HN) on contracted US firms running 'generative engine optimization' — SEO's successor aimed at what LLMs retrieve and cite. Clock Tower X has built a network of sites including Allyvia, FactSignal, Paxpoint, Justorium, and CompassionPulse designed for search engines and AI systems rather than human audiences; Brad Parscale's firm was reportedly paid $46.5M for content intended to influence chatbot responses on Israel, Gaza, and US-Israel relations, inside a broader $145M ministry campaign. For anyone building RAG or research agents, this is the concrete version of a threat that has mostly been theoretical: adversarial content farms optimized specifically for retrieval-and-cite, not for ranking or readership, and invisible to engagement-based quality heuristics.
↳ Follow the thread