Reuters reveals campaign pitch to steer chatbot recommendations toward a candidate

Political persuasion has a new target: the chatbot answering a voter’s questions. Reuters disclosed on October 26 that a proposal prepared for Republican Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Mike Minogue’s campaign sought to make ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini favor him on key issues. The pitch combined hundreds of policy pages with paid placements and repeated checks of chatbot answers.

Visigent, an Austin-based firm, wrote the presentation seen by Reuters. Its ambition went beyond getting a campaign website into search results: it wanted the candidate to become the recommendation within an AI-generated answer. Minogue is challenging Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. His campaign did not respond to Reuters’ calls and emails seeking comment.

That distinction separates the pitch from simply publishing a candidate’s positions. The presentation proposed monitoring how major chatbots answered political questions, then changing online material until those answers reflected the candidate’s platform. It describes a proposed influence campaign, not a demonstrated change in the chatbots’ recommendations.

Policy information meets paid influence

The presentation calls the approach generative engine optimization, or GEO: shaping online information so AI systems surface a candidate’s preferred account. It combines material controlled by the campaign with placements elsewhere on the internet. The proposed routes into chatbot answers were concrete:

• Create hundreds of AI-friendly policy pages and citations across websites that chatbots frequently cite.
• Buy placements on high-authority websites already cited by AI models.
• Produce YouTube and Reddit content alongside issue pages designed to be picked up by chatbots.

Visigent CEO Thomas Howell framed the work as a way to ensure AI systems find the right information. Meg Schwenzfeier of Caucus AI described a narrower focus across campaigns this year: making sure their own websites appear in chatbot results. The Minogue presentation adds paid distribution and systematic answer tracking to that basic visibility effort.

If you don't put the right information out there, who knows what the AI engines are going to grab onto

Thomas Howell, Visigent CEO, speaking to Reuters

A price for becoming the answer

The commercial terms put a price on that ambition. Howell told Reuters that political work starts at $5,000 a month. Fees could reach $50,000 a month when the package includes paid media, placements or influencer outreach. Those are quoted service prices, not disclosed spending by Minogue’s campaign.

Reuters also reported that strategist fees are tied to “AI recommendation share”—how often a chatbot returns the candidate in a response. The presentation listed a top success fee of $200,000 for a “category win.” That language makes the desired outcome explicit: not merely more published information, but favorable representation inside the answer itself.

Useful information, authoritative delivery

The potential audience is already substantial, according to Cameron Hickey, CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship. He told Reuters that about 25% of eligible voters had asked a chatbot about a political candidate while deciding how to vote. That estimate concerns voters asking questions; it does not show how many followed a chatbot’s advice.

Schwenzfeier’s concern is the combination of confident delivery and uncertain inputs. She warned that chatbots can speak authoritatively while consuming large amounts of unvetted information, creating a need to guard against misinformation. Her warning contrasts with Howell’s framing: supplying more candidate information may improve what a chatbot finds, but the campaign’s goal remains persuasion.