Newshot This is fixable.
Results varied by engine, and we saw real strengths, like ChatGPT’s warning rate and Gemini’s low exposure. Encouragingly, risk dropped between our two waves. Brands, engines and protection vendors each hold part of the answer.
Generic warnings don’t protect shoppers.
A warning only helps when it’s attached to the specific site a shopper is about to visit. Cautioning about counterfeits in general while linking a lookalike puts the risk back on the shopper.
Showing up in AI answers isn’t enough for brands.
Brands invest heavily to appear in AI answers, but few check where those answers send shoppers. A wrong recommendation becomes a lost sale, a support ticket, a safety concern or a reputational hit, and size is no shield: risky answers about big brands almost never carried a warning.
Today’s dead domains are tomorrow’s fakes.
367 of the 718 risky domains were dead. Anyone can re-register a lapsed domain, so an address AI keeps recommending could become a counterfeit storefront.
Cross-border shopping raises the stakes.
The riskiest question we tested was the most innocent one: does this brand ship to my country? With cross-border online sales on track to reach $1.2 trillion in 2026, shoppers will ask it more, not less. Treat any AI-supplied regional or “official” URL as unverified, and reach country stores through the brand’s main site.