u/VegetableBuy6752

We’ve been noticing something interesting while tracking AI referral traffic.

ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) are sending users to URLs that don’t actually exist on the site, but are close enough to real pages that they look valid.

When users click those, they land on a 404 and drop off, and we end up losing high-intent traffic without even realizing it.

What’s happening here is that LLMs don’t always link to exact URLs. They sometimes generate paths that approximate the right page, but miss the exact structure.

If AI is sending you traffic, there’s a good chance some links are breaking like this

Quick way to check:

• Pull landing pages in GA4 filtered by ChatGPT / AI sources
• Export the URLs
• Run a crawl using the site audit tool 
• Check status codes
• Filter for 404s

Those are essentially hallucinated URLs.

Fix:

• Map those URLs to the closest real pages
• Implement 301 redirects

Feels like one of those early AI-search quirks that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it

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We spent several years on traditional SEO for Google, but now GeoSmart is here and starting to become essential for optimizing our content for AI!

What do you think will be next? SEO for superintelligence? What are your predictions?

For most of the SEO and all of the GEO subs - this is already true

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, creator of the most popular AI chatbot on Earth, says he’s starting to worry that “dead internet theory” is coming true.

“I never took the dead internet theory that seriously,” Altman tweeted in his typical all-lowercase style, “but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.” (LLM meaning large language model, the tech which powers AI chatbots.)

He was resoundingly mocked.

“You’re absolutely right! This observation isn’t just smart — it shows you’re operating on a higher level,” responded one user, imitating ChatGPT’s em-dash laden prose.

But the most common rejoinder was a photograph of the comedian Tim Robinson in a hot dog suit, referencing a skit in which a character who obviously crashed a weiner-adorned car desperately tries to deflect blame, exclaiming at one point that “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this!”

The “dead internet theory” is a half-prophetic conspiracy that suggests that effectively the entire internet has been taken over by AI models and other autonomous machines. The vast majority of the posts and profiles you see, the theory holds, are just bots. In fact, you’re barely interacting with humans at all — everything you access online is just a machine-maintained illusion, almost like “The Matrix.”

Do you want our opinion at Eskimoz?

I want to fully learn and master SEO / GEO 2026 including tools, tactics, ranking, backlink, authority, etc. Is there any decent courses not simple general articles you recommend?

Thank you. I would really appreciate your support.

I am not sure, but there is something wrong with Quora. There was a time when I felt like writing and posting stuff.

I was active in multiple spaces until they introduced the AI assistant bot that summarised all the answers and showed them at the top, above all the answers.

Additionally, there is a huge confusion between two conversations. Sometimes you can't distinguish ads from other questions.

Like, how are they making money?