AI chatbots become target of US election influence campaigns

VisionHeight uncovered a network of 460 pages across 14 US states built to manipulate AI chatbot answers about elections. The content is optimized for AI crawlers rather than humans, with sites explicitly allowing major AI companies to scrape them, and Perplexity has already cited one page.

• Network spans 14 states and 460 pages of content
• 37 sites registered in one night, 36 within 8 minutes
• About 100,000 words of candidate content published Sept. 30
• Perplexity cited Tarheel State Report as its first source