Fake affiliate codes outnumber real ones on Google, and AI cites the crowd

A legitimate Chatwoot affiliate discovered in July 2026 that at least seven fabricated discount codes for the platform outrank his verified code across Google search results. Codes promising discounts of 20% to 70% circulate across blogs, coupon aggregators, and social media, despite Chatwoot's published affiliate terms offering only a 5% referral discount to customers. The author observed Google's AI Overview citing his accurate code one day, then reverting to generic information the next, apparently influenced by how many independent domains repeated each claim. He argues the episode exposes a structural flaw in retrieval-based AI systems: corroboration across multiple sources is treated as a proxy for accuracy, which fake coupon content exploits cheaply and at scale. The author responded by explicitly naming the false codes and stating the correct discount figure on his own site, though he acknowledges a single honest source remains disadvantaged against dozens of fabricated ones.