Why it matters
Metehan Yesilyurt, an AI search researcher at Peec AI, had an AI write 50,000 pages of made-up statistics in one day. One of the numbers, that 68% of e-commerce orders are delivered within the same day, was printed by Gulf Times and repeated by QNB Financial Services in its Daily Market Report.
I think you can't trust the numbers coming out of AI yet, even though it would be lovely to.
What he built
What he built
StateGlobe is a site of 50,000 statistics pages on SEO, marketing, social media, e-commerce and web tech, for 200 countries. In his post on the Peec AI blog he says an AI wrote all of them in one day, for about USD 50 in all, and that "every number was totally invented. I never checked a single one."
Google dropped the site after two updates. Indexed pages now get 5 to 20 impressions. ChatGPT kept opening the pages: by his Cloudflare count, about 72,000 requests from ChatGPT-User in 30 days. In his post that is "the agent ChatGPT uses to open a page in real time while answering someone."
- He started building in March 2026. The post is dated 7 October 2026.
- He says GA4 shows 10,000+ sessions from ChatGPT alone, and that Ahrefs and Semrush show 330+ linking domains, including Shopify, DHL and Bluehost.
- He says he shares it as research and writes that you should never publish fake content.
Where the numbers went
Where the numbers went
Gulf Times printed the sentence on 9 May 2026, in an article by Santhosh V. Perumal: "According to StateGlobe, as much as 68% of e-commerce orders are delivered within the same day". The QNB Financial Services Daily Market Report of 10 May 2026 has the same sentence a day later. We checked both on the original documents.
A research paper lists a StateGlobe page in its references. He calls this citation laundering. In his post, each citation made the fake data look more trustworthy.
- He also says the numbers appear in an economics publication in India and in a research report from a Canadian influencer community. We have not opened those two documents.
| Where | What we checked |
|---|---|
| Gulf Times, 9 May 2026 | Prints the 68% sentence and names StateGlobe. |
| QNB Financial Services, Daily Market Report, 10 May 2026 | Repeats the 68% sentence. |
| Research paper, Sun and Xu, MDPI, 4 August 2026 | Lists the StateGlobe page Live Streaming Growth and Video Marketing Statistics in China in its reference list. |
We read these three on the documents themselves. The ChatGPT and traffic numbers under What he built are his own data.
Sources: Gulf Times, Tech, speed and squeeze: CEP market in transition (9 May 2026), QNB Financial Services, Daily Market Report (10 May 2026), The paper, Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research, MDPI, and Peec AI, Publish stats, get cited (7 October 2026)
What this does not show
What this does not show
Nobody has shown a ChatGPT answer repeating one of these numbers yet. His post shows ChatGPT opening the pages and the numbers turning up in other documents. Nothing we found shows that the Gulf Times author, the bank or the paper's authors used ChatGPT.
The traffic, link and ranking numbers are his own data, from Cloudflare, GA4, Ahrefs, Semrush and Peec's tool. Nobody else has checked them. Peec AI sells AI search monitoring, and the post is on its blog.
His own writing differs on the details. The post says GPT-4.1 and about USD 50 in all. His March write-up says 60,000 pages and about USD 20, and the site's About box says gpt-4.1-nano and less than $10. We use the post's figures and say about.
- Was the site labelled? His post says it "now carries a disclaimer". His March write-up says he added an About box then and hid it from AI crawlers on purpose. We could not confirm whether visitors saw a label on every page.
- Hacker News commenters are split. One called it "poisoning the internet". Others say the effect is old, and one named it citogenesis, the Wikipedia term.
- The paper is about live-stream e-commerce, and the StateGlobe page is one entry in its reference list. We did not find the sentence in the paper that uses it.
- We could not load the StateGlobe page behind the 68% figure, so we have not seen it.
Sources: Peec AI, Publish stats, get cited (7 October 2026), His March 2026 write-up, 60,000 pages, Hacker News, Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs, and StateGlobe, the site
Read the sources
Read the sources
Four documents behind this page. The paper, the bank report and the Gulf Times article are the originals. The Peec AI post is his own account.
- Open the paperThe paper (MDPI)
Sun and Xu, Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research 21(8), article 259. The StateGlobe entry is in the reference list.
Our crop of the paper's reference list, MDPI (CC BY) - Open the reportQNB Financial Services Daily Market Report
10 May 2026. The StateGlobe sentence is in the item Tech, speed and squeeze: CEP market in transition.
Our crop of the QNB Financial Services Daily Market Report - Read the articleGulf Times, 9 May 2026
Tech, speed and squeeze: CEP market in transition, by Santhosh V. Perumal.
Our screenshot of the Gulf Times article, 9 May 2026 - Read the postThe Peec AI post, 7 October 2026
Publish stats, get cited: The tactic that put my data all over the web, by Metehan Yesilyurt.
Our screenshot of the Peec AI blog post
Yes, that's my AI avatar in the video. Same opinions, better lighting.