How Big Brands Support Unreliable Al-Generated Sites

NewsGuard identified 141 brands feeding programmatic ad dollars to low-quality news and information sites operating with little to no human oversight

- JACK BREWSTER, ZACK FISHMAN and ELISA XU

MAJOR GLOBAL BRANDS ARE supporting the proliferation of unreliable artificial intelligence-generated news and information websites (UAINS) by funneling programmatic advertising dollars to the rapidly growing number of such sites, a NewsGuard analysis has found.

These ads appear to have been generated programmatically, meaning that rather than the companies choosing to have their advertisements appear on these sites, they were positioned automatically through a system that places ads regardless of the nature of the website. This programmatic approach thus funds low-quality and misinformation sites, while failing to protect "brand safety," with most of the ads placed by Google.

NewsGuard defines UAIN websites as sites that operate with little or no human oversight and publish articles written largely or entirely by bots. NewsGuard has recently updated the number of sites on its newly launched UAIN site tracker from 49 to 217. (Read more about how NewsGuard defines a UAIN site at the end of this story.)

Many of these Al-generated sites appear to be entirely financed by programmatic ads. Some of the websites churn out huge volumes of articles on which ads can be placed-one site produces an average of more than 1,200 articles a day-thereby incentivizing the creation of these low-quality, AI-generated sites with little to no apparent editorial oversight. Although many advertisers and their advertising agencies maintain "exclusion lists" of "brand unsafe" websites where their advertising should not appear, these lists are often not kept up to date and clearly have not kept pace with the surge in UAIN sites.