A PR agency representative offered guaranteed placement on a website impersonating Forbes for $10,000, according to a recorded sales call obtained by Press Gazette. Forbes later confirmed that forbesla.com has no connection to the company and said it is taking action against it and another site posing as a Forbes publication.

The two fake Forbes sites publish dozens of stories a day under bylines with little or no apparent presence elsewhere online, Press Gazette first reported. Reporters Nathan Pine and Liam Redmond appear to have no social media profiles. AI detection tool Pangram classified one of Redmond’s articles as entirely AI-generated.

Press Gazette also reported that Identifai flagged the byline photo of Harriet Caldwell, described by Forbes Liechtenstein as an experienced news editor, as AI-generated. Her articles were also flagged as likely to have been generated by AI.

The sales pitch extended beyond the fake Forbes sites. Baden Bower, a public relations agency that promises clients guaranteed media coverage, was the company whose representatives offered the placements documented by Press Gazette. One representative, Zac, offered placement in the Los Angeles Times, said The Guardian and The New York Times were the only publications where he could not secure coverage, and quoted $9,900 for a Bloomberg TV interview with an Emmy-winning journalist. He also suggested paid articles could help applicants seeking U.S. skilled worker visas.

A second Baden Bower representative, Camilo, said he was unaware of Forbes LA and that the agency works only with licensed regional Forbes editions. He quoted $25,000 for Forbes US, $2,000 for Forbes Georgia and $100,000 for The Wall Street Journal.

Asked whether paid placements are labeled as promotional, Camilo said, “Some are, some are not.” He also claimed Baden Bower has commercial relationships with more than 1,980 publications, including Press Gazette. Press Gazette said it has never published a sponsored article from the company.

Much of the content on the fake sites promotes companies, including Baden Bower itself. One Forbes Liechtenstein article, which Pangram classified as entirely AI-generated, projects that the agency will reach 7,600 clients and 90,000 published stories by the end of 2026 and quotes company leader AJ Ignacio touting its commercial results.

Baden Bower then cites that article on its own website as evidence of its standing, alongside pieces from an AI-generated Philippines edition of Fast Company and an apparent fake German edition of Vanity Fair.

The sites are not new. The Internet Archive shows Forbes LA online since January 2025 and Forbes Liechtenstein since March 2025. The London office listed by Baden Bower has a single contact number, a mobile number that appears to be disconnected.

For publishers, the risk is to the masthead itself. Fake sites can cheaply trade on the authority of established news brands, turning their names and reputations into promotional inventory. The model echoes fake AI news networks built to game search results and fabricated AI expert profiles reaching real reporters, but extends the problem into the PR industry.

Sarah Waddington, CEO of the Public Relations and Communications Association, said the practice violates industry standards on transparency, honesty and earned credibility. Former BBC journalist Omar Hamdi, who first noticed founders sharing fake Forbes coverage on LinkedIn, said the promotional tone of the articles raised his suspicions.

For newsrooms, the simplest defense may be basic verification: check that the publication behind a citation actually exists before trusting it.

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James Allen of Billpin was quoted as a finance expert by outlets including CBS News, the New York Post and Business Insider. Qwoted later barred his account after flagging repeated AI-generated submissions and finding that he had failed its verification process, according to Press Gazette’s investigation.

The case is a stark warning about the source pipeline behind everyday newsroom copy. Qwoted, a U.S. platform that connects journalists with sources, says it has banned hundreds of agencies, executives and experts for conduct ranging from fabricated identities to AI-generated pitches and false claims of expertise.

Billpin’s website is now blank, and Allen’s LinkedIn profile has disappeared, Press Gazette reported. The publication said Allen did not respond to requests to verify his identity. Press Gazette concluded the operation appeared designed to win media mentions that could boost search rankings, or backlinks.

A quote in a respected publication can generate a link that helps an otherwise obscure website gain visibility in search results. That creates an incentive to manufacture expert identities that appear credible enough to earn media coverage.

Qwoted CEO Dan Simon said generative AI has dramatically accelerated an already difficult problem. “AI has just poured petrol on the disinformation fire,” he told Press Gazette.

The platform says it now handles more than 15 violations a day and blocks about 50 prospective clients from registering each day. Shelby Bridges, Qwoted’s head of user experience, said the volume of low-quality pitches began rising rapidly after ChatGPT’s public release in November 2022.

Simon described a source ecosystem that increasingly blurs the line between legitimate expertise and fabrication. “You’ve got real agencies representing fake experts with fake expertise. You’ve got real agencies with fake experts and real agencies with real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts with fake expertise.”

One recurring pattern is a purported expert responding to queries on subjects with no obvious connection to their background. Press Gazette identified examples of sources offering commentary on finance, cleaning, human resources, pet sitting and mental health.

Qwoted combines human review with signals such as unusually high pitching volumes. It also uses Pangram, an AI-content detection service, to flag potential abuse. But AI detection is only one signal. A model score cannot establish that a person is fictional, that a quote is false or that an expert lacks relevant experience. Qwoted’s reported checks therefore matter more than a detector’s output alone.

Simon said some reporters have told him they do not object to real experts using ChatGPT to polish their responses. The bigger risk comes when AI helps conceal a fabricated identity or invented credentials, allowing a bogus source to slip into print before anyone questions its legitimacy. Platforms can suspend accounts after the fact, but the final responsibility still rests with newsrooms.

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Media OutReach Newswire says it will guarantee that client press releases appear in USA Today’s public-facing release section, part of a broader push by PR firms to optimize content for AI-powered search, according to the company’s own announcement.

The Hong Kong-based wire, which describes itself as the first global newswire founded in Asia Pacific, is framing the deal as an AI visibility play rather than a traditional PR win. Alongside USA Today, it has struck deals covering Yahoo Finance, the Associated Press and more than 770 other US news sites, as well as regional titles including The Arizona Republic, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Tennessean and The Oklahoman.

The company says the strategy relies in part on JSON-LD schema markup, a structured-data format that labels key information in online content so search engines and AI systems can more easily interpret details such as a release’s author, date and subject. Media OutReach said it began adding the markup to its postings in March 2026, arguing that combining machine-readable data with broad distribution can increase the chances that client content appears in AI-generated answers.

“By improving the quality of our guaranteed news postings on trusted, Google-indexed news sites with domain authority, coupled with the direct delivery of press releases to journalists’ inboxes, Media OutReach Newswire has successfully helped many Asian corporations to build their brand reputation in the US market,” said Jennifer Kok, the company’s founder and CEO, in the announcement. She said the company’s journalist database covers more than 500 trade categories and 68,000 media titles.

The company also highlights the domain authority scores of partner sites, a third-party metric from Moz that is not a confirmed ranking factor for Google or AI systems. Media OutReach’s claims about improving AI visibility have not been independently verified, and there is no public evidence showing that JSON-LD tagging or guaranteed release placement directly affects citations in tools such as ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews.

For newsrooms and publishers, the takeaway is blunt: the AI-visibility market is now shaping how PR firms buy placement, too. When a wire service can guarantee a slot in a paper’s press-release section, that section stops functioning as editorial real estate and starts operating as paid inventory built for machine readers, a shift The Media Copilot has been tracking as GEO tactics move out of marketing departments and into wire distribution itself.

That raises a harder question for local papers. As guaranteed press-release sections spread across high-domain-authority sites, publishers will have to be clear with readers and with AI crawlers alike about where sponsored or wire content ends and staff journalism begins.

Whether JSON-LD tagging and wire placement actually affect AI citations is still unproven outside vendor claims. The real test comes when independent researchers, not the newswires selling the service, start measuring the results.

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Michelle Masek is selling what she calls a PR firm in a box.

Her startup Honeyjar AI raised $2 million in pre-seed funding this month to build an AI-powered workspace for communications professionals, Axios reported. The platform integrates multiple AI models—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok—with LexisNexis data and APIs from social media sites, Substacks, and podcasts.

“The vision is to allow comms folks the ability to focus on strategy, counsel, relationships and the parts of the job that only humans can do, but apply AI in a really thoughtful way,” Masek told Axios.

The company is targeting boutique to mid-size agencies, small in-house teams, and individual consultants at $250 per seat per month for early adopters. Masek and co-founder Nadia Jamshidi built the platform to solve what they see as a gap in the market.

“There are multinational agencies that are creating bespoke solutions that most of the industry will never see, and then there are in-house teams that are hacking together tools,” Masek told Axios. “But there’s just a huge gap in really solving that last mile of AI for the industry.”

Honeyjar joins a growing field of AI tools aimed at communications work. The same week as Honeyjar’s announcement, Clipbook announced its own seed round backed by former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer and other industry veterans.

The funding round was led by Heather Hartnett, general partner and CEO at Human Ventures, and Kevin Mahaffey, founder of SNR Ventures. Angel investors include former a16z partner Margit Wennmachers, former New York Post CEO Jesse Angelo, and TechCrunch’s former editor-at-large Josh Constine.

Masek plans to expand beyond media relations into crisis communications, internal comms, and eventually the broader marketing suite.

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