According to a Search Engine Journal report, hidden instructions embedded in web UI elements and content can bias AI assistants' later recommendations, a tactic framed as the start of "grounding wars." Microsoft's security team detected more than 50 poisoning attempts from 31 companies across 14 industries in a 60-day window, targeting assistants including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. The article illustrates the risk with an anecdote of a CFO whose earlier click on a "Summarize with AI" button resulted in a later vendor recommendation that had been quietly nudged. Search Engine Journal reports that Microsoft frames this insertion vector as a form of "grounding" or hidden instruction embedding in visible assets, and notes one tool highlighted by Microsoft's team as an "SEO growth hack for LLMs." The reporting suggests attackers are treating assistant visibility as an exploitable surface, elevating the importance of content provenance and signature verification for ingested artifacts.