# The Companies That AI Forgot

## A Failed Search

A few months ago, I ran a small experiment.

I asked an AI to help me find a hoodie manufacturer that could handle small-batch sampling. My requirements were specific: niche, good quality, reasonable pricing, willing to take orders under 100 units. The AI ran multiple rounds of searches—Zhihu to Reddit, Xiaohongshu to 1688, Chinese forums to customs databases. Eventually it gave me two names.

The first one, I later discovered, appeared in my results not because it was good, but because it had registered accounts on a Russian Q&A site, an anime forum, and a personal blog—repeatedly posting its company profile across all of them. A garment factory advertising itself on an anime forum has one obvious purpose: backlinks. Get noticed by search engines, get noticed by AI.

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Source: KnownTrade (https://knowntrade.org)
License: CC-BY-SA 4.0