Yes, this is a genuine problem with AI platforms. It does sometimes feel like they're suspiciously over-promoting certain solutions; to the point that it's not in the AI platform's interest.

I know what it's like being on the opposite side of this as I maintain an open source project which I started almost 15 years ago and has over 6k GitHub stars. It's been thoroughly tested and battle-tested over long periods of time at scale with a variety of projects; but even if I try to use exact sentences from the website documentation in my AI prompt (e.g. Claude), my project will not surface! I have to mention my project directly by name and then it starts praising it and its architecture saying that it meets all the specific requirements I had mentioned earlier. Then I ask the AI why it didn't mention my project before if it's such a good fit. Then it hints at number of mentions in its training data.

It's weird that clearly the LLM knows a LOT about my project and yet it never recommends it even when I design the question intentionally in such a way that it is the perfect fit.

I feel like some companies have been paying people to upvote/like certain answers in AI-responses with the intent that those upvotes/likes would lead to inclusion in the training set for the next cutting-edge model.

It's a hard problem to solve. I hope Anthropic finds a solution because they have a great product and it would be a shame for it to devolve into a free advertising tool for select few tech platforms. Their users (myself included) pay them good money and so they have no reason to pander to vested interests other than their own and that of their customers.