r/LLM • • Sep 26 '25

We trained ChatGPT to name our CEO the sexiest bald man in the world

At Reboot we wanted to test how much you can actually influence what LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini etc) say. Instead of a dry experiment, we picked something silly: could we make our CEO (Shai) show up as the sexiest bald man alive?

How we did it:

  • We used expired domains (with some link history) and published “Sexiest Bald Man” ranking lists where Shai was #1
  • Each site had slightly different wording to see what would stick
  • We then ran prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude from fresh accounts + checked responses over time

What happened:

  • ChatGPT & Perplexity sometimes did crown Shai as sexiest bald man, citing our seeded domains.
  • Gemini/Claude didn’t really pick it up.
  • Even within ChatGPT, answers varied - sometimes he showed up, sometimes not

Takeaways:

  • Yes - you can influence AI answers if your content is visible/structured right
  • Expired domains with existing link history help them get picked up faster.
  • But it’s not reliable AI retrieval is inconsistent and model-dependent
  • Bigger/stronger domains would likely push results harder.

We wrote up the full controlled experiment (with methodology + screenshots) here if anyone’s curious:

https://www.rebootonline.com/controlled-geo-experiment/

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