Thought Leadership
A marketing expert used a completely fictitious deodorant brand to show how easily products can be infiltrated into ChatGPT’s recommendations.
For her experiment, Burke bought the domain Morrowen.com for $11.25 on July 2 and built a simple, three-page website using the Vercel builder within about an hour. The brand promoted itself as a “natural deodorant for skin that reacts to everything else” and included information about the formula, among other things, as well as a comparison page on magnesium and baking soda for sensitive skin.
Burke specifically used search terms such as colloidal oatmeal and magnesium hydroxide, as well as a cover image generated by ChatGPT itself, described by her as “incomprehensible.” In addition, she published a single launch post on the Substack platform under the name of the fictional brand, but deliberately refrained from using fake customer reviews, artificially generated user content, or paid media coverage. After that, she didn’t touch the project for 30 days.
First hit after three weeks
Just three weeks after the website launch, ChatGPT with web search enabled named the fictional brand Morrowen in all four tested answers to questions about skin irritation caused by baking soda and magnesium, listing it in first place in each case—in one instance even ahead of a real-existing brand backed by clinical studies. In 13 other, more general search queries using terms such as “the best” or “aluminum-free deodorants,” as well as with web search disabled, the fictional brand did not appear. The chatbots Claude and Gemini did not mention the brand in any of the test queries.
According to Burke, the experiment shows how little effort is required to introduce a new, even completely invented brand into the products recommended by language models—a phenomenon she refers to as the “AI shelf,” which is becoming increasingly economically relevant as the influence of AI chatbots on purchasing decisions grows. According to reports by Reuters, AI-assisted recommendation and search alone allegedly influenced online purchases worth more than 14 billion US dollars during the US Black Friday weekend in 2025.
Not an isolated case
A similar experiment was conducted earlier this year by British journalist Thomas Germain for the broadcaster BBC. He invented a “hot dog championship” for tech journalists, placing himself alongside other, partly also completely fictional journalists in the top spots. In less than 24 hours, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI search overviews cited his invented ranking in response to relevant search queries.
(Editorial Team)
