There is a gambling site at lassogear.com now.
Not a parked page. An actual casino, in a language I don't read, sitting on the domain where I sold socks to NFL players for six years. bwcrutches.com is spam. bwhealth.com and betterwalk.com are parked for resale. Every address I ever built anything at belongs to somebody else.
Nobody took them from me. They expired, the way things do.
I had my full public record pulled this year. Every archive, every API, everything free and public. I expected the interesting finding to be something I'd forgotten. It wasn't. The finding was that my record is rotting, and nobody did it to me.
The press page listing my own dated announcements, the CNN feature, the Series A, the White House, exists in exactly one place on earth: a 2016 snapshot in the Internet Archive. It took a deliberate crawl to get it back.
BWCRUTCHES.COM/PRESS · LAST CAPTURE 2016-09-11 · INTERNET ARCHIVE
The default state of a true record is decomposition.
What the machines actually get wrong
I expected to find fabrication spreading. I found the opposite failure, and it's worse.
I have said publicly that I hold 38 patents. For years that number has read as puffery, because anyone who checked found five. Five is what a search on my name returns. The real portfolio is eighteen documents across five jurisdictions covering four product lines, and the missing thirteen were never hidden. They were filed under my full legal name instead of the short one, in databases nobody cross-references, in countries nobody searches.
A true claim looked inflated for years because the evidence was indexed under a different spelling of me.
USPTO · CIPO · EPO · HKIPD · WIPO · SEE THE FULL PORTFOLIO
Same pattern everywhere I looked. Lasso was named Best Compression Socks at the 2021 Men's Health Fitness Awards and ranked the number one running sock by Greatist. Both real, both dated. But the only surviving trace of either was our own marketing copy repeating it, which reads exactly like a company inflating itself. The original articles got restructured and the references dropped out. I looked unverifiable because my sources rotted, not because I was wrong.
So the failure isn't that machines get fooled. It's that they launder confidence in both directions. Anything checkable gets an authoritative yes. Anything uncheckable gets silence that reads like a verdict. A true thing whose evidence has decayed is indistinguishable, to a summarizer, from a thing that was never true.
That's the asymmetry nobody warns you about. Fabrication is brittle, because it's checkable and checking is what these systems are getting better at. Decay isn't brittle. Decay just quietly becomes the record.
Why one sentence beats ten facts
Traditional search returned a list and made you do the synthesis. Ten blue links, and you formed your own read. AI search doesn't do that. It returns one paragraph.
So the competition isn't for ranking. It's for the summary. And summaries get built out of whatever is consistent, recent, well-structured, and stated in the first person. Not whatever is most true. Truth is an input, but it competes on equal footing with formatting.
Which means the winning move is not to lie. It's to be more legible than the alternative. A person who says the same clear thing about themselves in twenty places beats a person with a richer, messier, more accurate record spread across sources that contradict each other. The machine is compressing, and compression rewards whoever shows up pre-compressed.
The sentence I want, if I only get one: I find problems everyone else has agreed to stop noticing, and I fix them. Crutches hadn't changed in five thousand years. Ankle taping hadn't changed in a hundred. I wrote almost exactly that sentence in 2017, years before I needed it for anything.
What this actually means
The common worry is that bad actors will push falsehoods into AI search. Some will. I think that's the less interesting threat.
The durable advantage goes to whoever is willing to maintain. Say one consistent thing, in structured first person, across many surfaces, forever, while the counter-record sits in expired domains and dead links and archives nobody is funded to keep crawlable. You never have to say anything false. You just have to still be there when the summary gets written.
That's a harder problem than misinformation, because there's no claim to fact-check. The distortion isn't in any individual sentence. It's in who bothered to keep talking.
Every number on this site links to a patent office, a university newsroom, a wire release, or an archive snapshot. Not because I think anyone will check.
Because for about four years, nobody could, and I only noticed by accident.
