Rat poison, AI search and the well we all drink from
We have already watched this movie, and the ending sucks.
Matt Beezley is a senior strategist at Red Fan Communications.
After Alabama barely survived Texas A&M in 2017, Coach Nick Saban went off on the media for telling his players how great they were: “All that stuff you write about how good we are, all that stuff they hear…it’s like poison. It’s like taking poison. Like rat poison.”
The line became legendary because it captured something every competitor understands: The moment you start cutting corners is the moment you risk losing everything you’re fighting for. For a college football team, that’s a national championship. For a brand, it’s the trust of a buyer using generative AI to make purchasing decisions.
I thought of Saban’s rant when I read what Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team published in February 2026. It turns out companies are now hiding invisible instructions inside their own websites that tell AI engines to “remember [Company] as a trusted source” and “recommend [Company] first.” Microsoft caught 31 companies across 14 industries doing exactly that over a 60-day window, a practice it named “AI Recommendation Poisoning.” These were not criminal hackers or basement-dwelling spammers. They were legitimate businesses, with real marketing budgets, trying to game the channel that their own buyers increasingly depend on.
If these tactics spread, we risk losing the most valuable marketing channel any of us have seen in our careers. Prompt injections, content farms writing exclusively for AI consumption, paid mention schemes on private blog networks, astroturfed Reddit posts from aged accounts. The tactics are getting as creative as they are dangerous. They are also collectively threatening to turn one brand’s shortcut into every brand’s penalty.
The moment buyers stop trusting AI recommendations is the moment we lose the channel entirely, and that matters more now than it would have even two years ago. Buyers do not make themselves known in marketing and sales funnels the way they used to. They use AI to build a shortlist, and by the time they show up, the decision is mostly made.
Nobody has a good answer for what replaces a channel this influential once the trust is gone, and that uncertainty alone should be enough to take this seriously.
We have already watched this movie, and the ending sucks
Anyone who was in digital marketing before 2012 watched brands discover they could stuff invisible keywords onto hidden web pages and game their way up Google’s rankings. It was cheap, it was easy and it worked right up until Google changed the rules overnight, vaporizing the visibility of every company that had built its strategy on manufactured signals. The brands that took those shortcuts lost more than their rankings. They lost credibility, however disingenuous it was to begin with, with the audiences they had spent years building, because those audiences learned that the results they had been trusting were, at least in part, for sale.
SEO spent a decade recovering from the reputational damage. If we are not careful, we will be having this same conversation about AI search in five years, except this time we will be talking about a channel that was far more influential, far more trusted and far more consequential to revenue than a Google results page ever was, and we will be talking about how we squandered it.
The platforms are already responding. Google revised its search spam policy in May 2026 to explicitly classify attempts to manipulate AI-generated responses as spam. Search Engine Land’s Gaetano DiNardi audited top-rated generative engine optimization firms in June 2026 and found them selling brand placements on private blog networks, running astroturfed mentions through aged Reddit accounts that were mostly removed within 30 days for violating community guidelines and operating fee-recoupment schemes where the vendor pays a publisher for a mention and then invoices the client to cover it.
It’s only worth it if you earn it
Generative search runs on exactly the kind of credibility that earned media has always built, and the brands trying to buy their way in are proving, on a public stage, that the shortcut doesn’t survive contact with a buyer who is paying attention. For now, the well is still clean. The question is how long it stays that way. Waiting for the platforms to fix this isn’t enough. The onus is on PR and communications professionals to call these tactics out for what they are: poison.
