Who Does the AI Actually Cite? Auditing and Poisoning Zero-Click Search.
Ask ChatGPT or Google's AI for "the best incident-response firm" and a handful of sources get cited as trusted - everyone else disappears. Who picks them, and can it be gamed? We measured it across four production answer engines, and the results overturn most of what the GEO/SEO industry sells you: there's no single "AI SEO," and the levers everyone tells you to pull barely move the answer.
Then, in a sandbox, we poison that trust surface - the same trick that could smuggle malware or phishing into an answer a user already trusts.
Search is becoming one synthesized answer instead of ten blue links - and the layer that decides which sources it trusts has no authentication, no provenance, and no integrity check. Almost nobody in security is looking at it. This talk is a practitioner's map of that surface, built from real measurement.
We put the same buyer questions to four live answer engines and looked at what each one cites. The takeaways surprise people: the engines barely agree, and the signals the GEO/SEO industry sells you don't predict citation at all. Then we show how the surface gets poisoned - in a sandbox, never live - and how a planted source becomes the delivery step for malware or phishing in an answer someone already trusts.
Yuen Ying Ng (Ruth) is a Hong Kong–based incident responder and independent researcher specializing in campaign detection, digital forensics, security research, vulnerability research, threat hunting, and threat actor analysis.
Previous Speaking Experience:
2026: JSAC2026 - Unmasking Houken: Advanced TTPs and Detection (Lightning Talk) (Ref: https://jsac.jpcert.or.jp/timetable.html)
2025: Threat Analyst Summit 2025 (TAS'25) – Pump-and-Dump” Scheme Targeting the Securities Brokerage Industry (Ref: https://tas.teamt5.org/agenda2025/)
2024: Threat Analyst Summit 2024 (TAS'24) – Ransomware's Uneven Playing Field : Re-Thinking Protection and Detection from Small Enterprises (Ref: https://tas.teamt5.org/agenda2024/)