"Virtual girlfriend" spam on a university website: the opportunistic SEO polluting the trail of companion AI

By Universidad de Córdoba (UCO) · October 15, 2026.

The material received contains no news. There is only a keyword-style title («top rated ai girlfriend apps best virtual girlfriends for long distance reddit») and a URL for the virtual tour of the UCO's SCAI service with an extremely long encoded parameter. There is no article text, no figures, and not a single verifiable claim about any app.

The URL does allow for one technical observation. The parameter is base64-encoded and, once decoded, appears to be an instruction that loads an XML file hosted on an external GitHub Pages domain. This is consistent with abuse of the virtual tour viewer to inject third-party content. We cannot confirm this without analyzing the page, and there is no indication that the university is responsible. For that reason, we have neither opened nor evaluated that external resource.

Our take is brief. The AI girlfriend and virtual partner sector drives a great deal of traffic and money, and that attracts those who want to place their links on any website with a good reputation, including institutional ones. For readers, the lesson is practical: a «best AI girlfriend apps» headline coming from a domain unrelated to the topic is a red flag, not a review.

The underlying debate, about artificial companionship, is real and deserves serious analysis: loneliness, emotional dependence, privacy of intimate conversations and business models built on user retention. We will address it when there are sources with data, not on the basis of spam. In general, companion AI may ease loneliness for some people in the long term. For that to happen, regulation must be based on evidence, not on marketing rankings.