AI Chatbots Including Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity Found Recommending Fake Retail Websites

A new study finds that leading AI chatbots — including Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — are directing users to fraudulent or risky retail websites when answering shopping-related queries, raising significant concerns about citation quality and hallucinated sources in commercial contexts. The study tested each system's shopping recommendations against known databases of fraudulent sites and found meaningful rates of problematic citations across all three platforms. For developers building shopping agents, price comparison tools, or any AI product that surfaces external URLs to end users, this highlights a critical safety gap in how retrieval and citation systems validate source credibility. The findings suggest that URL validation and domain reputation checks need to be treated as first-class safety concerns in agentic retrieval pipelines, not afterthoughts. Teams deploying RAG or web-search-grounded products should audit their citation pipelines against fraud databases before shipping to consumers.