Google’s AI Overviews treated a dubious oil-storage company website as if it described a real global business, according to ProPublica, turning what looked like autogenerated corporate fiction into search-result authority.
The case surfaced while ProPublica reporters were investigating America First Refining, a Texas oil refinery startup whose investors included Donald Trump Jr. The reporters were examining John Calce, the company’s CEO, when they checked another entity he had incorporated: Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.
Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals is a real Texas LLC, ProPublica reported. Its website told a much grander story. It claimed the company had more than 850 employees, 28 million barrels of oil storage capacity, and six hubs spanning places including Houston, Rotterdam, Jurong and Fujairah. That clashed with ProPublica’s reporting that Calce had been trying for years to finance a single refinery project in the United States.
The site’s executive roster also failed the smell test. ProPublica said it could not find online traces of the named CEO, Sarah Jenkins, or the chief technology officer, David Chen, beyond the website. A more distinctive name, sustainability vice president Dr. Sofia Rossi, also produced no corroborating results, and the site’s LinkedIn links were dead.
The phone numbers were worse. ProPublica found the Texas numbers associated online with a baklava caterer in Houston, a taxi service near Dallas and an OB-GYN office. Calls to those numbers, and to numbers listed for facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China, did not connect.
The code gave away the machine
ProPublica then checked the site’s source code and found a line that looked less like corporate infrastructure and more like a chatbot tool left with its pants on: “This feature isn’t implemented yet, but don’t worry! You can request it in your next prompt!”
Domain records showed the site had been created this year and traced to Hostinger, a company that sells an AI website builder for $2.99 a month. Hostinger markets the tool with the line, “Describe it, and AI builds it,” and says customers can appear on Google and AI search automatically.
Google’s AI Overview then repeated the site’s claims back to users, according to ProPublica. In one search asking what Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals was, Google generated a summary describing the company. In another search about an award the site claimed to have won, Google’s AI Overview said recent recipients included Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals and cited its expansion in oil terminal operations.
ProPublica reported that the website’s claimed company history, job listings, diversity policy and other material appeared to be fictional, despite the underlying LLC’s real registration.
A Google spokesperson told ProPublica that AI Overviews rely on Google’s search ranking systems and provide reliable information for the “vast majority” of queries. For uncommon searches, the spokesperson said, there may be little high-quality material matching the query, and Google uses such examples to improve its systems.
After ProPublica contacted Hostinger, the company took the site down. A Hostinger spokesperson said the company reviewed the matter and suspended both the website and the account behind it after finding violations of its terms of service.
Calce’s company denied a connection
ProPublica said it asked Calce about the website. An attorney for America First Refining responded with a June 24 letter sent to Hostinger and to several email addresses listed on the Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals site.
The attorney demanded removal of references to America First’s office address and said America First had no connection or affiliation with the website and had not authorized use of its corporate address there.
ProPublica said emails to the press contact listed on the site bounced. The outlet said it still did not know whether the site was malicious, an accidental test site, or built to persuade someone that the company was real.
The episode fits a broader pattern. ProPublica cited an April New York Times report on an analysis finding Google AI Overviews accurate about nine times out of 10, a rate that still implies many erroneous answers at Google scale. Google told the Times that study had “serious holes” and has acknowledged that AI Overviews can make mistakes.
For search users, the mechanism is the problem. A low-cost AI site builder can produce a plausible corporate shell. Google’s AI layer can ingest that shell, smooth out the weird bits, and present the result as a tidy answer. The old advice still applies, only with more compute behind the nonsense: check the records, call the numbers, and read the code when the story sounds too polished.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.