Hackers Poison AI Answers, Fake Support Hits 374 Brands
Researchers say a campaign called Dark Sourcery tricks AI chatbots and Google's AI Overview into serving scam support numbers for at least 374 brands.
AI search News and Analysis
9 verified stories covering AI search, product updates and industry developments.
Open-source search agent Iris ships, context beats raw parameters
AllSpark Research's open-source search agents Iris-mini and Iris-pro post record BrowseComp scores, with context management outperforming raw parameter scaling.
Israeli-Backed 'Think Tank' Fed AI Models 124 Reports
A Guardian probe found a fake think tank published 124 pro-Israel reports in nine days, built to be cited by AI chatbots rather than read by people.
One Poisoned Page Gets AI to Push Fake Products 27% of the Time
FORGE shows one poisoned web page gets AI search assistants to recommend a fake product up to 27% of the time.
Mistral's Multi-Step Retrieval Pushes Financial Q&A to 86%
Mistral's Agentic Search replaces one-shot RAG with multi-step tool use, lifting FinanceBench accuracy from 26.7% to 86% while cutting tokens and latency.
AnySearch tops Product Hunt with search built for AI agents
AnySearch tops Product Hunt with search built for AI agents. The piece reviews the verified facts and why the signal matters beyond one announcement.
Google Tests an AI Search Opt-Out for UK Publishers
Google is adding Search Console controls that let sites stay out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI summaries in Discover, starting with a small UK trial.
AI search engine Exa raises $250M at $2.2B valuation
Exa Labs closes a $250 million Series C led by a16z, tripling its valuation to $2.2 billion in six months.
Perplexity Positions Itself as an Answer Engine, Not a Search Engine
Perplexity has seen rapid growth by offering direct AI-generated answers instead of link lists, using external models and its own search and RAG system to synthesize information from multiple sources.