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I Built a Tool That Detects SEO Poisoning Across Multiple Search Engines

404Saint on May 02, 2026

By RUGERO Tesla (@404Saint). It started with an article I couldn't stop thinking about A few months back I read about how attackers wer...
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bhavin-allinonetools profile image
Bhavin Sheth

This is a really smart idea… most of us just trust top results without thinking twice.
Cross-checking across engines + context check makes a lot of sense—would’ve saved me once from downloading a fake installer 😅

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null_saint profile image
404Saint

Exactly that! And honestly that's the whole reason this exists. The top result feels trustworthy by default, that's the assumption the attack relies on. One engine is gameable, six at once is a much harder problem to solve for an attacker.

Sorry you had to learn it the hard way though 😅 hope it wasn't too painful to clean up.

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Mykola Kondratiuk

curious how you handle the temporal gap - by the time the scanner catches a poisoned result, someone may have already clicked. is detection alone enough or is there a remediation step?

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404Saint

That's the right question to ask and honestly it's a current limitation worth being straight about. Arkoi is a pre-click tool, you run it before you download anything. So the temporal gap you're describing is real if someone is already in the habit of click first, verify later.

The remediation side isn't built yet. Detection is the foundation but the logical next step is alerting, whether that's flagging a domain across a team, pushing deceptive results to a shared blocklist, or integrating into a workflow that intercepts the download before it lands. Those are all things I've thought about but none of them exist in the codebase right now.

The honest answer is detection alone isn't enough at scale. It's enough for a security-conscious individual running a deliberate check. For broader protection you'd need the tool sitting upstream of the user, not downstream of their curiosity. That's a harder problem and probably a separate project.

Good thing to open an issue about though.

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itskondrat profile image
Mykola Kondratiuk

fair. so it’s workflow discipline as much as a scanner. the adoption wall is habit - click-first teams need real training to add a pre-step consistently. any browser hook or purely manual?

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404Saint • Edited

Spot on. It’s a workflow discipline tool for now. A browser hook is the logical 'user-proof' solution, but that requires a different tech stack than my current Python/FastAPI focus. I'd absolutely welcome a contribution or a separate project that wraps the Arkoi logic into an extension, it would be a killer way to solve that adoption wall.

GitHub Issue #8

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itskondrat profile image
Mykola Kondratiuk

the "open for contributions" framing is smart — the extension can live as a community layer on top of your core. someone with webext experience builds it without touching your FastAPI stack. that separation makes it more likely to actually ship.

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404Saint

Thank you very much.

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Guardr

Thanks for sharing, it was very intresting! the bored weekend experiments are actually works well for you!

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404Saint

Haha honestly the best stuff comes out of boredom. Might be onto something with that workflow 😄 glad you found it interesting!