LLM grooming

The strategy — named by the American Sunlight Project — targets machines rather than people. Its sites often have almost no human audience; the goal is simply to be indexed by search engines and ingested by the crawlers that feed AI systems.

The Pravda network is the most-documented example, having published millions of articles aimed largely at AI ingestion.

Its real-world effect is genuinely debated, and an honest reading holds both sides. Independent studies suggest the influence concentrates in "data voids" — narrow topics where little reliable information exists — rather than across the board, and that headline figures can overstate the impact.

The more serious long-term risk is not today's citations, which can be filtered, but the slow contamination of future AI training data, which is far harder to reverse.