A UCO virtual tour used as “AI girlfriend” SEO bait: the spam that slips into legitimate websites

By Universidad de Córdoba (UCO) · October 13, 2026.

There is no article to summarize. The material consists only of a title made up of keywords ("ai girlfriend review ai companion benefits usa") and a URL for the virtual tour page of the UCO's Central Research Support Service (SCAI). It contains no text, figures or data about virtual companions.

The URL is what stands out. It carries an `xml=` parameter holding a base64-encoded string, plus an identifier containing the same search term. If our decoding is correct, that string tells the virtual tour viewer to load an XML file hosted on a GitHub Pages domain that has nothing to do with the university. We have not been able to verify what that file contains or what has happened on the UCO's server. All we can say for certain is that the link is anomalous.

Our take: it looks like an SEO spam technique. The method involves appending parameters to a legitimate, reputable page, such as a university's, in order to rank commercial content. If that is the case, the UCO would be an unwitting vehicle rather than an actor. This is a hypothesis, not a proven fact.

For readers, the lesson is about information hygiene. An institutional domain does not guarantee that the content is reliable. In the "virtual partner" space, where sponsored reviews and satellite pages are plentiful, any "review" whose URL has nothing to do with its title deserves suspicion. That is why we are not publishing any analysis of the supposed benefits of these products based on this source.