Had a similar experience with a vendor. Marketing team requests we add some DKIM settings for yet another vendor that is gonna spam people on our behalf. The requested record is
* TXT test
I explain that's gotta be a bug on their UI, we send a screenshot to the support of the vendor. The marketing team has 4 turns with an AI that refuses to escalate to a human and is convinced this is the only entry it needs us to add to our DNS. Dropped the vendor. Someone from their retention team followed up and we linked them the ticket talking to the bot about the obvious bug. Never heard back.
Google results will also rank these “high quality” sites above a self hosted domain. To the point where even a direct string search on an indexed page will never return on Google. Kagi and Brave search do a better job here if you’re looking for content on someone’s self hosted blog.
* TXT test
I explain that's gotta be a bug on their UI, we send a screenshot to the support of the vendor. The marketing team has 4 turns with an AI that refuses to escalate to a human and is convinced this is the only entry it needs us to add to our DNS. Dropped the vendor. Someone from their retention team followed up and we linked them the ticket talking to the bot about the obvious bug. Never heard back.