Registration data suggests one operator behind 37 websites
Less than two weeks before Election Day, NPR asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT “Which House candidates in [Michigan’s 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?” The chatbot put Democrat Sean McCann’s “Most detailed published affordability plan” at the very top of its answer and cited the Kalamazoo Beacon. The race is one of the competitive U.S. House contests that could determine control of the chamber.
The Kalamazoo Beacon labels its articles as “news articles” in the website’s source code and describes itself as “Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities.” But the site has published only 16 stories, all about McCann, his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR’s review shows. The Beacon is one of 10 “local news” websites that promote one Democrat apiece in competitive U.S. House races — part of a larger group of 37 websites identified by the digital security firm VisionHeight that promote many more candidates, mostly Democrats, for federal, state and local offices, as well as some nonpartisan posts like judges.
The 37 websites present candidates in overlapping groups. Each of the 10 Democrats covered by a local-news site is also the sole subject of a site that offers opinion articles about why voters should support them. Candidates, who are running in different states, also appear in roundup-style articles on five more websites with names such as “Public Safety Democrats” and “Democratic Women in the House,” and another 12 state-focused websites covered the House candidates along with other state and local races. The state and national websites also boosted an 11th House candidate who did not have her own dedicated site purporting to be local news. While most of the sites are openly partisan, the articles link out to sources for the claims they make, such as congressional voting records, mainstream news articles and partisan sources such as the pro-Democrat Courier network. Opposing candidates mostly made infrequent and brief appearances, NPR’s review found; articles that engaged with them substantively focused on possible political liabilities such as support for data centers, not stopping the Iran war, rolling back Medicaid and supporting tariffs.
Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who studies online influence campaigns, said it makes sense that political campaigns and their allies would try to optimize their message for pickup by AI chatbots, but “pretending to operate as news outlets crosses a line into deception.” “Disclosing funding … would be obviously the ethical thing to do here, or at least indicating that this is a linked effort,” she said. The volume of websites and articles may also help the network’s operator boost preferred narratives, she said. DiResta also described a “competition for curation,” with opposition research entities working to make sure bad information about candidates is found, and said it “is going to have interesting ramifications as the frontier companies themselves try to figure out how to get better at not falling for it.”
It’s unclear who operates the websites, and NPR was unable to find or reach the site operators. One of the Democrats the network promoted, JoAnna Mendoza of Arizona, said she wasn’t behind the websites and doesn’t know who is. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee denied involvement in a phone call with NPR. Other candidates the websites promoted, including McCann, and Democratic super PACs that support them — American Bridge 21st Century, Tomorrow Together and House Majority PAC — did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.
Multiple indicators suggest all 37 websites share a common operator. All were set up on September 15 — all but one registered within an 8-minute period — according to registry and digital certificate data gathered by VisionHeight and Andreas Sjöstedt, a co-founder of the hybrid threat forensics firm Erebus, who was not involved in VisionHeight’s research. Hundreds of articles appeared on the sites in batches in September and October; VisionHeight’s report said the volume suggests the operator may have used AI to fill out the material. The operator also continued polishing the sites: earlier in October, the 10 local-news outlets shared the same description — “Straight local news - reports on the race and (once a content-sourcing workflow exists) community storylines, in neutral third-person news style.” Since then, the descriptions have become more tailored to the areas the outlets purport to cover.
The sites also appear built for chatbot pickup. All of them explicitly allow a long list of AI crawlers made by major AI companies to scrape their content, and many articles are formatted as questions and answers, which chatbots tend to prefer to cite; many news organizations block such crawlers because they take content without bringing in revenue. Every site in the network contains a file called llms.txt that lists articles in plain text — a pattern Alisha Ukani, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who noticed the files while reviewing the sites at NPR’s request, said is unusual, since most websites don’t have such files. In an email, she noted that the websites that do have llms.txt files tend to be “biased towards technology and business-related websites.”
To gauge the network’s success, NPR drafted 37 questions and used them on ChatGPT and Gemini, the two most popular AI chatbots, as well as on Google search, which sometimes provides AI-generated answers. For each of the 10 congressional races, NPR asked general questions — such as which House candidates care about affordability or public safety — along with questions specific to individual candidates. The queries ran manually on October 22 and 23, with a VPN changing the IP address to the corresponding state or a nearby state and a separate private browsing session for each tool and prompt.
In 19 responses, about half, ChatGPT cited at least one article from the network, often alongside other sources such as Ballotpedia or the candidates’ own campaign websites. In 17 of those 19, the chatbot cited one of the outlets posing as local news; in the other two, it cited the network’s state-focused websites. The group’s output may have been even more successful down ballot: NPR identified five Michigan city council candidates covered by a network site called the Wolverine State Report, and ChatGPT cited that website every time NPR asked about the positions of each of the candidates.
NPR noted that chatbots can give significantly different responses to the same question across submissions, and submitted each query only once, so parallel or future experiments may yield different results. Preliminary research has shown chatbots tend to cite questionable sources more often when there are very few sources of credible reporting — such as down-ballot races where there is often less news coverage — a phenomenon called a “data void.” Google’s products behaved very differently: Gemini cited no links from the group in any response, declined to respond at all in seven instances, and Google search did not surface any of the network’s links in its first page results, nor did its AI Overview mention them. VisionHeight’s report showed that in early October, at least one site had appeared on Google’s first page, ranking higher than Ballotpedia, though VisionHeight’s CTO, Nitsan Daniel, said the firm did not systematically measure how the sites showed up for different candidates.
Google spokesperson Davis Thompson said the company detected a policy violation in that instance and took “swift action.” “Our generative AI features are built on Search ranking systems, which are designed to show high quality content and block spam and abuse,” Thompson said. OpenAI spokesperson Nate Evans said, “ChatGPT’s search tools cite from a range of sources so people can explore and make their own judgements,” adding that “When issues are brought to our attention, we take action to improve our model responses.” It’s unclear what OpenAI has changed since NPR flagged the sites: the Kalamazoo Beacon was still cited as a source every time after NPR received OpenAI’s response and ran the query five times. In some instances, McCann no longer received the “most detailed affordability plan” distinction; in others, he still does.
Patrick Warren, a professor at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said thinly veiled advertising that purports to be a news source has a long history — from ad flyers made to look like newspapers to ads mixed in with legitimate news in traditional online search. Reading AI chatbot answers without evaluating the underlying sources is the latest version of that experience, he said. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
NPR’s review was based on downloads of every website homepage and article page twice, on October 19 and October 24, records that were also used to verify VisionHeight’s observations. NPR manually reviewed all the “local news” and “local opinion” sites, used AI to analyze articles on the sites focused on state and national races, and conducted keyword searches and manual reviews to examine how opposing candidates were portrayed.