Phia, the AI-powered shopping platform co-founded by Phoebe Gates and environmental entrepreneur Sophia Kianni, is under scrutiny after researchers found its browser extension was allegedly attributing sales to itself through phantom clicks — a practice that allowed the company to collect affiliate commissions it had not legitimately earned.
The allegations centre on a technique known as cookie stuffing, in which an affiliate’s tracking code is planted into a transaction without the affiliate having meaningfully directed a user toward a product or influenced their decision to buy. Investigations by digital marketing researcher Ben Edelman, Bloomberg, and Capital One Shopping each identified instances where the Phia extension appeared to claim purchases using fabricated referral signals.
Edelman published a detailed breakdown of the mechanism, accompanied by a video showing Phia’s referral link loading invisibly inside a background tab in Safari on iPhone the moment a user visited a retailer’s site. The process occurred without any visible action by the user, meaning purchases could be recorded as Phia-referred even when the app played no role in the visit or the buying decision.
Beyond the unearned commissions, Edelman’s analysis noted that the practice also stripped revenue from other publishers and websites that had legitimately referred those customers to retailers.
Phia denied any deliberate wrongdoing, attributing the behaviour to a software bug. A company spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg: “Within the past 24 hours, we were made aware that a recent version of our codebase was causing some purchases to be incorrectly attributed for a subset of users. Upon being notified, our team worked through the night to identify the issue and mitigate its effects, and it has since been fully resolved.”
According to both Edelman and Bloomberg, the code that enabled the behaviour was introduced in a December 2025 update, several months before the issue surfaced publicly.
Phia launched last year and positions itself as a tool to help online shoppers compare prices and find deals in real time.
