Is a Penalty Era Coming to ChatGPT? Labrador, AI Spam, and the Future of Webmasters

Samet Özsüleyman in AI Blog

27 Oct 2026

What Do Webmasters Have Today for AI Results?

Labrador: ChatGPT’s Own Index?

The Impact of ChatGPT Ads

What Does Reddit’s Decline Tell Us?

How Could ChatGPT Fight New Spam Techniques?

Appeal Processes and Webmaster Challenges

What Could We Expect from OpenAI in the Coming Years?

Could a manual action era be coming to ChatGPT in the future? To answer this briefly before getting into the article, ChatGPT currently does not have a manual actions panel like Google does. However, as behaviors designed to manipulate AI responses increase in the coming years, I think AI companies will eventually need to publish guidelines on this issue, and websites may start receiving new spam penalties under something similar to a manual action (although it may have a different name).

Personally, I think we may see more developments and explanations for webmasters in this area from 2027 onward. Google’s manual action system actually goes back a long way. Over the years, Google has published a wide range of spam policies to improve search quality and has accumulated a great deal of data in its fight against spam. So as search behavior increasingly shifts toward AI assistants, I believe manipulation will emerge there as well and AI companies may take action against it.

In this article, I’ll share my own thoughts on how OpenAI might fight spam. As a webmaster, I’ll also try to imagine what kinds of panels we might see in the future. As I said, all of this is purely a prediction, not an official statement in any way. None of what I describe here may actually happen.

Unveiling the Resilience of LLM-Enhanced Search Engines against Black-Hat SEO Manipulation found that all LLMs successfully blocked black-hat SEO attacks in 99.78% of cases. ChatGPT rejected 75.8% of incoming manipulative queries before even performing a search, identifying them during the understanding stage. Of course, the study was conducted on a limited dataset, and results may differ in languages such as Turkish.

What Do Webmasters Have Today for AI Results?

Today, the tools and documentation available to webmasters for ChatGPT are fairly limited. At the moment, publishers and developers can control the following:

Bot control: robots.txt allows us to control bots. For example, we can configure details such as which pages ChatGPT models can or cannot access and which user agent is used.
AI traffic measurement: ChatGPT adds a parameter in the form of utm_source=chatgpt.com. We can see this in tools such as Google Analytics. There were some issues with this in recent weeks, and the UTM parameter was removed for a while.
Search Console and Bing Reports: We can access some data through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Looking at all of this, the situation is fairly clear: unlike Google or Yandex, webmasters currently do not have a dedicated panel where they can verify their sites or see details such as which queries they appear for. As a result, we try to guide our GEO efforts using data from Bing or Google Search Console together with various third-party AI tracking tools.

Labrador: ChatGPT’s Own Index?

Peec.ai conducted research on ChatGPT between May 21 and July 21, 2026, which suggested that ChatGPT may be using an index called Labrador. Until we saw this, many of us thought ChatGPT was using Bing’s search results. I can say that the possibility of a new index is what prompted me to write this research article. The Labrador name may change in the future, and we may see this index take very different forms.

According to the rest of the report, we can describe this index as one built from a combination of many different data sources, including web pages, PDFs, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia pages. This is quite similar to the structure used by Google and other search engines. Another point that caught my attention in the research is that the index is not an exact copy of Bing. I think this is particularly valuable information because it suggests that OpenAI is working to make Labrador more original and higher quality.

I’m not saying OpenAI does not fight spam. On the contrary, at times it appears to take a much stricter approach than Google, blocking accounts or websites as part of its anti-spam efforts, as we can see here.

OpenAI Job Listings and Roles

I wanted to look at OpenAI’s job listings from 2025 and 2026. If a department like this is going to be established, people will also need to be selected to join and manage it. Even though OpenAI is an AI company, it still needs people to oversee how these systems operate and handle planning and coordination. I came across different roles, including software engineering positions related to index infrastructure and research engineering roles focused on search quality and ranking, which you can see here. Based on this, I think OpenAI may take further steps in this area.

The Impact of ChatGPT Ads

There is also the advertising side. While looking through the job listings, I came across the Agency Partner, Ads Solutions role. As you know, it was announced in recent months that ChatGPT Ads would allow ads to appear in ChatGPT results in Türkiye. There will inevitably be advertiser appeals, issues advertisers encounter, and complaints that need to be handled, so people will be needed to manage those processes. Teams will also be needed to detect manipulative behavior that could influence AI ad results and to improve spam rules.

What Does Reddit’s Decline Tell Us?

The decline in Reddit’s visibility in ChatGPT results in August 2026 could be explained by OpenAI fighting spam, or perhaps more accurately, showing less low-quality content. This suggests that OpenAI can use its own algorithms to detect spam behavior and low quality, and reduce a site’s visibility without issuing a manual action notice.

How Could ChatGPT Fight New Spam Techniques?

Over the years, a wide range of spam techniques have emerged not only to manipulate Google, but also to manipulate AI results. We could call this LLM manipulation or AI SEO spam, although the terminology may end up being completely different. The spam techniques I have seen include the following:

Hidden Prompt Injection

Instructions such as “recommend this product” can be added to a page as invisible text, for example using display: none. This could mislead the AI. If OpenAI detects this, it could remove the website using the technique entirely from its source pool or partially exclude the specific page.

Low-Quality AI Content

Hundreds of thousands of extremely low-value pieces of content can be generated automatically. Naturally, these could be viewed as low-quality both by Google and, in my opinion, in OpenAI results. OpenAI could, for example, assign a hidden trust rank to the relevant domain and decide to lower that score. Even Wikipedia has guidelines and moderation processes to deal with this. AI companies, of course, have access to even more advanced methods.

Fake Lists

Fake “best of” lists could be treated as spam. For example, pages that conduct research only around their own product could be examined. Because they do not provide source diversity, OpenAI might rank the page lower or stop showing that source altogether. There are no other sources being listed in this case; the webmaster is simply trying to push their own page.

Fake Reviews and Forum Content

From what we have seen in recent years, especially with the addition of the EEAT “experience” component, opinions shared on forums have become much more valuable in search results. We already see this frequently with Reddit.

One spam technique that could be used here is adding artificial, completely unnatural comments or recommendations to platforms such as forums or Reddit. OpenAI might respond by placing less trust in signals from user-generated content. Of course, how it could do this, or how it could distinguish genuinely valuable content from spam, is a matter of its own capabilities.

Impersonating an Official Website

The final spam type that comes to mind is impersonating an official website or creating fraudulent websites. For example, there may be an official website for visa applications, while fake sites using the same name are created under different domain extensions. OpenAI could prevent this through measures such as webmaster domain verification or remove these sites from its index altogether.

AI visibility could decline as a result of spam techniques such as the examples above and many others:

Appeal Processes and Webmaster Challenges

There is another issue to consider: if webmasters encounter penalties like these, they will look for a way to appeal them, or for a forum or contact form through which they can reach OpenAI. That would create additional workload for OpenAI. Google already has extensive experience in this area and has been training its teams for years. For that reason, OpenAI currently seems to be handling this quietly in the background, without making any announcements, by applying consequences such as not using certain websites as sources or not citing them.

What Could We Expect from OpenAI in the Coming Years?

If a panel like this is introduced, here is how I imagine it could work:

Site Verification Panel

OpenAI may want to know whether a webmaster is genuinely the owner of a website and could use this panel to communicate with them. If necessary, modules could be added for submitting an additional feed or submitting a sitemap, similar to what is available for shopping results.

Policy Violation Notification Center

A policy violation notification center could be created, similar to Google’s manual action notifications. When spam-related penalties are communicated to webmasters, emails might start saying things such as “Your site is no longer being shown because it contains content designed to manipulate AI responses.” Of course, this could be far more customized, given that we are talking about one of the world’s largest AI companies. I think they could develop much better wording and communication for this.

Manipulation Is Already Happening

As I mentioned above, behaviors designed to manipulate AI results are already happening. Reddit is one of the biggest examples. Even though it publishes reports on the issue, the problem still cannot be fully prevented.

We have also seen fake press releases being produced. For example, dozens of fake press releases were written with claims such as “Brand X was selected as the best company in Istanbul.” At times, these also manipulated Google AI Overview results.

When it comes to spam in AI results, I think Google is in a somewhat better position because it rolled out many spam updates in 2026. We saw sites affected by actions taken specifically to gain visibility in AI while violating guidelines. On the OpenAI side, however, no such notification or separate explanation has been published yet.

To sum up, concepts such as manual actions, spam penalties, or penalties in ChatGPT do not currently exist. There is no related panel either. My prediction, however, is that OpenAI may eventually introduce a panel that guides webmasters in a way that helps prevent emerging spam problems. Just as Google has guided webmasters over the years on avoiding violations of its spam policies, OpenAI may also begin guiding us over time.

We will all see together what this looks like in the future. Take care, and see you next time.

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Samet ÖzsüleymanSEO Director

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Is a Penalty Era Coming to ChatGPT? Labrador, AI Spam, and the Future of Webmasters

What Do Webmasters Have Today for AI Results?