One of the most insidious problems in the current AI ecosystem is “Hallucinated Authority.” This phenomenon occurs when an AI model trusts a domain because of its historical reputation in the training set, even though the domain has since expired, been auctioned, and is now hosting spam or disinformation.

For the MCP-SEO professional, avoiding citations from these “Zombie Domains” is critical. Linking to them damages your own “Co-Citation Trust,” effectively poisoning your site’s reputation in the eyes of the model.

Buying expired domains to inherit authority is the oldest trick in the Black Hat book. In the LLM era, it creates a new phenomenon: “Zombie Knowledge.”

How it Works

1. Training Phase (2022): TrustworthySite.com is crawled. It has high authority links from Gov and Edu sites. The model learns: “TrustworthySite.com is a good source for Finance.”
2. Expiration (2024): The domain drops.
3. Spam Phase (2025): A spammer buys it and puts up AI content about “Crypto Scams.”
4. Inference Phase (2026): A user asks “Is this Crypto site legit?” The Agent searches, finds a positive review on TrustworthySite.com (now spam), and because of its internal parametric memory of the domain’s authority, it trusts the spam review.

Hallucinated Authority

The model “hallucinates” that the domain is still safe. It hasn’t updated its weights to reflect the change in ownership.