No longer able to rely on traditional lobbying, Israel is pouring huge funds into ‘cognitive warfare’ aimed at manipulating the responses of AI platforms. By Aharon Porath

The documents revealed that the website was built using res.ai, an online service that analyzes how chatbots find sources and display information, and in turn shows companies how to create content that these systems are likely to deem credible and cite in their responses. Piro itself markets AI Story Optimization, a service designed to create and publish LLM-tailored content on external websites.

The logic behind these services resembles a long-standing concept in digital marketing: Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. But it is adapted to an era in which users no longer turn to search engines for further reading but to chatbots that generate answers directly in conversational language. This emerging field is known as generative engine optimization, or GEO. (…)

A ministry representative described the creation of dozens of informational websites on subjects including October 7, UNRWA, Hamas documents, and international reports, as well as analyses tracking how different AI models responded to that material. She characterized the effort as “an all-out information war” and said the ministry was systematically working to influence AI models, counter what she described as “media biases,” and expose “false information, including cases where journalists are exposed as being involved in terrorism.”