Research: Programmatic and News Aggregators Are Cooked, Social Is a Discoverability Terror.

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.