05/31/2026
It's sad, but those who use technology and understand it as part of their business plan to take advantage of people are almost always faster than businesses that are just marketing with it.
I make the point because googling as we used to know it is gone, and AI searches taking over.
In my industry, almost nobody understands this except for the black market players who prey on people and are pretty much scam companies.
The legitimate dealers and brands barely exist for AI, but the fake companies whose entire model was pushing out false affiliate reviews and such are now flooding the internet with scrapable fake information. It's just the advancement of the marketing dichotomy we'd already been living through, where the public thought that the internet was going to give us information except that people making money on the internet always superseded actual information, AI is just supercharging it.
Or, put it another way, most of the information you found on the internet is there to be found, not there to be correct. Or to help you.
I had a client asking me about a specific product he had used in a facility. And he was thinking about buying that product. Notwithstanding the fact that the product in question was actually a new version but is still using pretty old patenting, I could understand him wanting to replace his current elliptical machine with that. Even though his current machine actually produced a better workout and was easier on the joints.
Not only does AI not understand that, but it was recommending he purchase a used machine from one of these scam dealers across the country. The AI he was using was completely ignorant of everything I mentioned above in the biomechanics or patents, but also didn't understand that the current technology on the model he had used isn't available yet on the used market much because That specific biomechanical patent only became available right before the pandemic and thus there are not a lot of used models with that particular actual biomechanic yet. So the actual motion he was trying to purchase isn't really available on the used market yet. On top of it, the particular company that makes that product was purchased recently and part support is pretty negligible and their actual success trajectory is in question.
As a local dealer with actual in-house service, I get calls from these fake companies all the time asking me to go repair stuff that they've delivered to clients that arise broken. They don't have the service network they pretend to have. No online or national company does. They just call your local dealers and hope to find somebody desperate enough to fix their mistakes.
But the AI information spit out to this client didn't know anything about The patents, the actual products and brands or the reality of service, it's just regurgitated back the scrapable content that it was being specifically fed.
