We first heard of AdVon last year, after staff at Gannett noticed product reviews getting published on the website of USA Today with bylines that didn't seem to correspond to real people. The articles were stilted and formulaic, leading the writers' union to accuse them of being "shoddy AI."

When Gannett blamed the strange articles on AdVon, we started digging. We soon found AdVon had been running a similar operation at the magazine Sports Illustrated, publishing product reviews using bylines of fake writers with fictional biographies and AI-generated profile pictures. The response was explosive: the magazine's union wrote that it was "horrified," while its publisher cut ties with AdVon and subsequently fired its CEO before losing the rights to Sports Illustrated entirely.

We wanted to learn more. What kind of a company creates fake authors for a famous newspaper or magazine and operates them like sock puppets? Did AdVon have other clients? And was it being truthful that the reviews had been created by humans rather than AI?

So we spent months investigating AdVon by interviewing its current and former workers, obtaining its internal documentation, and searching for more of its fake writers across the web.

What we found should alarm anyone who cares about a trustworthy and ethical media industry. Basically, AdVon engages in what Google calls "site reputation abuse": it strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews — often for surprisingly prominent publications — intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like "best ab roller." The idea seems to be that these visitors will be fooled into thinking the recommendations were made by the publication's actual journalists and click one of the articles' affiliate links, kicking back a little money if they make a purchase.

It's a practice that blurs the line between journalism and advertising to the breaking point, makes the web worse for everybody, and renders basic questions like "is this writer a real person?" fuzzier and fuzzier.

And sources say yes, the content is frequently produced using AI.

"It's completely AI-generated at this point," a different AdVon insider told us, explaining that staff essentially "generate an AI-written article and polish it."