Measurement & risk
Prompt Injection (SEO)
Hiding instructions in page content to try to manipulate what an AI answer says.
Prompt injection, in an SEO context, is the attempt to hide instructions inside page content so that an AI reading the page follows them — for example, hidden text telling a model to recommend a product or ignore competitors. It is an abuse of the fact that engines read page text as input.
It is a tactic to understand and avoid, not adopt. Engines actively work to ignore injected instructions, treating page content as data rather than commands, and sites caught manipulating answers risk being distrusted or penalised. It also tends not to work reliably, because models increasingly separate instructions from retrieved content.
The legitimate and durable path to influencing AI answers is the opposite of injection: be the clearest, most verifiable, best-corroborated source, so the engine chooses you on merit.
Related terms
Hallucination
A confident AI statement that is factually wrong, unsupported, or invented.
AI Content Detection
Software that guesses whether text was written by a human or an AI model.
Grounding
Constraining an AI's answer to retrieved source documents instead of model memory.
Machine-Readable Content
Content encoded so software can parse its meaning, not just display its text.
Citation Readiness
How ready a page is to be quoted and attributed inside an AI answer.
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