The "AI girlfriends" coming through Japanese municipal websites are SEO spam, not news: a sign of web hygiene

By Tema ES · virtual girlfriends/partners · 25 October 2026.

The available material is just one headline repeated three times with variations (“How to find the best virtual partner generators”, “Find your virtual girlfriend with AI…”, “Create a girlfriend with AI…”). Two of the three pieces are credited to “小豆島町”, the town council of Shodoshima (Japan), and the third to Fabryka Norblina, a Polish site. We could not download any of the article's content: there are no figures, products, companies or technical details to verify.

What we can see is the URL. It is a page on a Japanese municipal domain (town.shodoshima.lg.jp) with added parameters, including a base64-encoded value. Decoded, it appears to be an XML fragment for the krpano panorama viewer that loads a file from an external domain. We cannot say who did this or why. It fits the known pattern of spam that exploits legitimate institutional websites to gain search engine ranking. That is why we are not linking to or recommending any of these pages.

Our take: the underlying topic, AI-powered virtual companionship, is real and deserves serious analysis. In general, virtual partner apps raise legitimate questions about loneliness, emotional dependence and the privacy of intimate data. But this batch of results offers no evidence on any of them. It is noise slipping into topic feeds.

The practical lesson is short-term and unglamorous. As generating promotional text costs next to nothing, search engines and aggregators fill up with pages like these, and filtering sources becomes part of the job. In the long run, the same technology should help detect spam better than it produces it today. In the meantime, we would rather publish little and honestly than pad out a story that does not exist.