23 fake Alberta referendum websites were written for AI chatbots

Someone built 23 websites about Alberta’s independence vote that were written for AI chatbots to read, not for people. Some of them give the wrong date for the vote.

What the investigation found

Canada’s National Observer published the investigation on September 4, 2026. The sites are AI-generated and push Alberta separatism. They target specific groups: farmers, young people, veterans, mothers and oil industry workers.

Several contain false voting information. Two of the sites say the vote is on October 26, a week after the actual referendum on October 19. Others give false dates for advance voting and misstate the wording and format of the ballot. Many feature fake people and invented testimonials.

The most unusual detail is in the code. The sites’ source code explicitly invites 11 AI chatbots and crawlers, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Common Crawl.

It is still unclear who is behind the network. The Observer found unexplained connections to Let Alberta Decide, the largest third-party advertiser for independence, and to several individuals in Florida.

Why the target is the chatbot

Election interference has usually meant targeting voters on social media. This network aims somewhere else: at the answer a person gets when they ask a chatbot a simple question, such as when to vote.

The approach depends on how AI search gathers material. If a chatbot pulls from whatever is easy to crawl, a small network of pages built to be crawled can shape its answers without ever reaching a large human audience. A wrong date repeated in a chatbot’s answer arrives with the chatbot’s apparent authority, not the credibility of an obscure website.

What it means for the vote

The one-week gap between October 19 and October 26 is the concrete risk. A voter who trusts the later date would miss the referendum. For the companies whose crawlers were invited, the case tests whether their systems can separate fabricated local sources from real ones before election information reaches users.