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More and more people are using AI like a search engine – 42 percent of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots to search for information – and that shift is exposing a structural vulnerability that adversaries are exploiting to seed propaganda. In practical terms, this is a problem of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) – the deliberate effort to shape digital content so that AI chatbots absorb and repeat it.
The research so far points to data voids — the thinly covered topics where there isn't much credible information to begin with — as the weak spot. This includes breaking news or new material that has not yet had time to accumulate the signals that would flag it as low authority.
AI can process far more information than any human can, but there is an inherent trade-off in outsourcing the curation of information to an AI summary. In the search era, users were exposed to source material and evaluated credibility for themselves. Now AI does that work, and research shows the large majority of AI queries end without a click.
This is both a business concern and a national security concern. The clearest example on the consumer side is Apollo-9. In a Chinese state TV investigation, researchers used a tool called Liqing to flood the web with fake reviews and rankings for Apollo-9, a fitness tracker that did not exist. Within hours, chatbots were recommending the fake fitness tracker and some continued to do so a day after the fraud was exposed. Liqing and other tools are sold openly on Chinese e-commerce platforms like Taobao and JD.com, with pricing ranging from roughly $520 to $4,765 for three-month subscriptions. One provider told Chinese state media it had served more than 200 clients across multiple industries, guaranteeing top-three placement on any AI platform.
In order to better understand these developments and their impact, this article examines how the same mechanism scales from commercial fraud to geopolitical disruption, using the Russia-Ukraine war as a live GEO lab. Leaked documents about Russia’s “Project 2026” and Ukraine’s AI‑enabled counter‑operations show how influence campaigns are evolving from social feeds to the underlying sources that AI systems draw on — an angle largely absent from existing information warfare debates.
Russia and the National Security Case: Same Playbook, Higher Stakes
When Russian operations exploit GEO in their war on Ukraine, they are not just spreading propaganda in the moment; they are trying to become the “ground truth” that AI systems summarize back to users, analysts, journalists, and policymakers. In June 2026, Bloomberg reviewed 73 leaked documents from the Social Design Agency (SDA), a sanctioned Moscow firm at the center of Russia's influence operations, describing a program its operators called “Project 2026:” a network of Wikipedia-style reference sites, media outlets, and fake think tanks built to shape what search engines — and AI systems — treat as reliable sources. The goal, as described in the leaked documents, is to “create an alternative information ecosystem” by shaping not only what people see today but also what AI systems will later “know” about key leaders, the war’s origins, Ukraine’s conduct, NATO’s role, and Western support.
Russia's GEO tactics build on years of search engine optimization (SEO) manipulation and are part of a widely reported pattern of industrialized cognitive warfare that includes deepfakes, cloned sites and other deceptive content. In 2023, a study published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review examined pro-Kremlin attempts to manipulate search engine results and found that pseudo‑think tanks and propaganda outlets such as Global Research and Strategic Culture Foundation were amplified through backlink networks and low‑quality sites. These outlets were most effective on conspiratorial searches involving, for instance, Ukraine President Zelensky, where authoritative content was sparse. Indeed, as noted by former CIA leader Jennifer Ewbank, the use of deepfakes to confuse, distort, or influence public opinion not only occurs in Ukraine but across Europe – all of which reflects “the same underlying reality: the tools for deception are faster, cheaper, and more accessible than the systems we rely on to detect or prevent them.” In other words, this is not just about deception, but the erosion of trust itself.
Storm-1516, a documented Russian disinformation operation that has been active since at least 2023, has scaled sharply in 2026. According to Bloomberg, the operation has produced more than 190 false stories since 2023 that the outlet has been able to identify. Based on Bloomberg’s reporting, Meduza adds that in the first quarter of 2026 alone, Storm-1516 was producing fake stories at twice the rate of the same period the previous year with, for instance, as of late March and early April 2026, materials appearing almost daily. Meduza also reports that more than 40 percent of Storm-1516’s fabrications have targeted Ukraine, with another third focused on electoral processes in other countries. Taken together, these reports demonstrate that Storm-1516’s operations are ultimately aimed at eroding Western support for Ukraine, swinging European elections and destabilizing NATO allies.
Taken together with the “Project 2026” leaks, these findings suggest that Russia is now attacking both the content layer (through synthetic media) and the source layer (through cloned Wikipedia‑style sites and fake think tanks) of information ecosystems. While synthetic videos and stories are often treated as short‑term deception, they also become part of the online record that future AI systems may ingest or retrieve, turning Russia’s layered influence architecture into a long‑term GEO problem, especially in data voids.
The Storm-1516 operation follows a clear pattern. A fake witness, often an AI-generated video, seeds a plausible but unverifiable story. Low-tier blogs and Telegram channels amplify it in multiple languages. Then less rigorous Western outlets pick it up, severing the link to the original Russian operator. By the time the narrative reaches mainstream discussion, the Russian fingerprint is gone. The new risk in today’s landscape is that the AI curation layer completes this laundering. It reads the now-repeated narrative across multiple sources and presents it as a neutral summary.
Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the chatbot DeepSeek was quoting VT Foreign Policy, an outlet known to carry content from Russian propaganda operations such as Storm‑1516 and to have connections to the Kremlin‑linked Strategic Culture Foundation. U.S. and EU sources describe the Strategic Culture Foundation as an arm of Russian state interests.
A 2025 NewsGuard study also found ten of the leading chatbots — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot — collectively repeated false narratives from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network about a third of the time. It’s important to note that a 2025 study in the Misinformation Review, responding directly to the NewsGuard findings, found the number was closer to 5 percent and that these failures clustered in data voids. While the researchers found "little evidence to support the grooming theory" and warned against "the overhyped specter of Kremlin manipulation," they acknowledged that data voids "may be artificially created" and that they could not dismiss the possibility that a disinformation campaign could target them. Importantly, their audit came fourteen months before the leaked “Project 2026” documents showed Russia explicitly targeting AI systems. The more Russia attempts to flood these data voids, the more likely it is that future AI summaries about Ukraine will inherit its framing.
How to Build Resilience – A Way Forward
Like its older cousin SEO, GEO is inherently dual-use, but it sits in a regulatory vacuum because it is viewed strictly as a consumer protection issue rather than a national security threat. The Apollo-9 experiment and the Storm-1516 operation prove they are two sides of the same coin; the same commercial tactics that manufactured demand for a non-existent fitness tracker can easily manufacture plausibility for distorted narratives about a geopolitical crisis such as the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. History shows that with traditional search engines, the market naturally incentivized tech companies to tackle manipulation head-on because mass spam threatened to destroy the user experience for billions of people, directly endangering corporate business models. Malicious foreign influence operations executing GEO are fundamentally different because they remain largely invisible to the mass market, with manipulation surgically clustered within obscure data voids, offering tech companies no commercial incentive to self-police and leaving the information terrain around a live European war effectively undefended.
To bridge this gap, regulators can draw on the lessons of private sector SEO defense and public-private counter-disinformation efforts, but they must realize that the exact same playbook will not work here. While private developers can easily dismiss the Misinformation Review study’s five percent finding as an acceptable commercial error margin, this minor statistical anomaly sits precisely in the data voids that Russia is actively trying to colonize, and so it represents a primary, unmonitored vector for foreign manipulation. The strategic risk is not only that GEO can mislead people in the moment, but that it can reshape the evidentiary record on which institutions and AI systems will later rely; if hostile narratives are allowed to dominate long‑tail topics and thinly documented episodes in the Russia-Ukraine war for instance, then future summaries, briefings, and even historical accounts risk being generated from polluted inputs.
The 2025 Misinformation Review study recommends "warning banners for data void queries" and increased "audit access," but notes the banners are "applied inconsistently" and the audit access is "hindered by power asymmetries.” Because the market will never self-correct a threat it does not financially register, protecting the integrity of generative content must transition from a voluntary corporate practice to a formal national security mandate.
In the Russia-Ukraine war, these dynamics are already visible. Russian operations such as Storm‑1516 use GEO‑style flooding and synthetic witnesses to launder narratives about the conflict into the broader information environment, while Ukrainian actors rely on AI‑enabled monitoring and evidentiary documentation to defend the integrity of the record. The contest is no longer confined to what populations see online today; it is over what AI systems will say is true about the war tomorrow. Recognizing GEO as a national security problem therefore changes the governance question: the training, retrieval, and ranking layers of generative systems are now part of the battlespace, and leaving this space unregulated is akin to leaving critical information infrastructure undefended.
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