THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Eurogamer's Jay Castello found a non-editable, AI-written wiki for the RPG Nighthawks ranking first on Google, filled with invented game data.
  • Hooded Horse chief executive Tim Bender says generative AI lets commercial operators mass-produce such sites to capture search traffic; the publisher keeps its own community-backed wikis.
  • Volunteer communities that left Fandom for independent wikis now compete for visibility against these fake sites.

Players looking up help for small independent games are increasingly landing on "wikis" written by language models rather than by fans, according to an investigation published by Eurogamer at the start of November. Under the headline "AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture", the outlet describes inaccurate sites taking over search results, fans pushed aside and publishers forced into a game of whack-a-mole. French site GameWorld summarised the findings on November 2.

What Eurogamer found

Reporter Jay Castello came across the problem while preparing coverage of Nighthawks, a vampire role-playing game from Wadjet Eye Games released in late September. The top Google result for the game was a "Nighthawks Wiki" that players could not edit; it only invited corrections by email. The site listed data and skills that do not exist in the game and mixed in material about the 1981 film and Edward Hopper's painting of the same name. Castello traced the domain to Spaceship, a web service that offers an AI site builder, and found many similar sites, mostly about small indie titles.

Another example involved Corsair Cove, a game published by Hooded Horse. The creator of a site called GameDB acknowledged using generative AI to produce tips and information about the game.

A publisher's view

Hooded Horse chief executive Tim Bender told Eurogamer that generative AI allows essentially commercial operators to mass-produce such pages in order to flood game searches and capture traffic. He said players who land on them end up confused, and that the publisher now has to track the sites down one by one. Hooded Horse sets up a wiki for each of its games and asks its community to help keep it accurate.

Why volunteer wikis are exposed

The trend lands on communities already in flux. Many fan groups have left Fandom, the largest wiki host, for independent domains. Game Developer reported in 2024 that the Terraria, Zelda, Fallout and Minecraft wikis had moved, and that Hollow Knight editors left after Fandom's generative "Quick Answers" feature produced faulty summaries; Fandom pulled it within 24 hours and later made it optional. According to GameWorld's summary, the communities that moved out now struggle to gain visibility on Google against the fake sites. The reports do not say how search engines plan to respond, and the sources consulted here include no comment from Google.