They were already doing this to seed Google. So business as usual for Mercer and co.
I suspect the only way to fix this problem is to exacerbate it until search / AI is useless. We (humanity) have been making great progress on this recently.
That's not how it is gonna play out, right now it makes many wrong statements because AI companies are trying to get as much funding possible to wow investors but accuracy will continue being compared more and more, and to win that race it will get help from humans to use better starting points for every subject, for example for programming questions is gonna use the number of upvotes for a given answer on stackoverflow, for a question about astrophysics is gonna preffer statmenets made by Neil deGrasse Tyson than by some random person online, and so on; and to scale this approach it will slowly learn to make associates from such curated information, e.g. the people that Neil follows and RTs are more likely to make truthful statements about astrophysics than random people.
That makes complete sense, and yet the cynic (realist?) in me is expecting a political nightmare. The stakes are actually really high. AI will for all intents and purposes be the arbiter of truth. For example there are people who will challenge the truth of everything Neil deGrasse Tyson says and will fight tooth and nail to challenge and influence this truth.
We (western society) are already arguing about some very obviously objective truths.
I suspect the only way to fix this problem is to exacerbate it until search / AI is useless. We (humanity) have been making great progress on this recently.