This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/research-programmatic-and-news-aggregators-are-cooked-social-is-a-discoverability-terror.
Inside a 5-month experiment with AI-generated local news sites and paid placements on real publisher sites. The gatekeepers held. Social is the real fight.
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Between January and May 2026 I built AI-generated local news sites and ran paid placements on real publisher sites to uncover how LLMs treat these tactics (which many are selling as a service). Across ~3,500 URLs, the network landed exactly one #1 ranking. The gatekeepers held. Social is a different problem, and that's the part of this you should be worried about.