full write up on link in bio

I made up a teardrum brand that does not exist, and 3 weeks later, Chatchapete was recommending it to strangers. It took me 1 hour work, I didn't do any word Reddit stuff, no fake reviews, and here's why I did that. I've written a tech newsletter for 5 years, and since June I've been mapping what I'm calling the AI shelf. To picture an actual shelf in a store, US Chatchapete was to buy, and there's a short list of brands it reaches for. That's the AI shelf. I've run almost 9,000 queries at it, it's opaque, but it sits in front of $6 trillion worth of global e-commerce if not north of that. So I wanted to know, can you get on the shelf? And you can. So by day 21, I got my first hit, by day 30, Chatchapete with browsing on, named Maroan, and directly underneath it, this very real brand. One of them exists, one of them definitely does not. Now it only moved to my 15 queries, native still fully owns the category, I just found one little dusty shelf in the back of the store that was still open. But beyond that, it reveals something about a relationship to shopping in AI. So you put something into Google, and you get a list of links. You get to decide who to trust. What AI did with Maroan, is it handed the copy that I wrote back to me in its own voice. And that voice made it sound vetted, made it sound like it had some authority. But of course it doesn't. And that's before agents own the whole loop from recommendation to purchase. So pretty soon I'm going to be telling my agent to keep my cabinet stocked. So it's going to pick, it's going to pay, trillions of dollars are going to be moving through this door, that currently no one can audit. It's very high stakes. Almost no one's watching it. I am.