A clear mountain lake at sunrise, every stone on the bottom showing through the water, and one beargrass on the shore

DIY resources · Telling the truth

How do I stay authentic in the age of AI?

Tell the truth, plainly, and keep it current. AI made words cheap. It did not make the truth cheap.

Start See why

48.3725° N114.1817° W

A sample, worked through

More pages, or one true page?

In the sample, a business puts up nine quick pages. Three of them go wrong: one keeps last year's price, one has old hours, one names someone who has left. Then the business writes one plain fact on its own page instead: in 2025, all 41 furnaces it put in passed inspection the first time. An AI tool repeats that fact, and says where it read it.

A sample. Not a real business.

1 of 4Words got cheap.An AI tool can write a page a minute, so the reflex is to put up more.
2 of 4Every extra page is another chance to be wrong.Last year's price, old hours, a person who left. Old pages give old answers.
3 of 4Say one true thing instead.Specific, dated and checkable, on your own page.
4 of 4The AI can repeat it.Spin doesn't survive a retelling. Facts do.

Pages this week9

old price
old hours
left last year

Your own page

In 2025, all 41 furnaces we put in passed inspection the first time.

specificdatedcheckable

An AI tool answers

“Every one of the 41 furnaces they put in during 2025 passed inspection the first time.”

Read: the business's own page

The answer

Write down what is true about your business, in plain words, with the numbers and the date. Keep it current, and stand behind every page. A machine can't see the truth. It repeats what you write down.

Key points

More pages is not more visible. Most of what AI tools cite was written by people.
Every extra page is another chance to be wrong.
Use AI to help you write. Stand behind every page.
One specific, dated, checkable fact travels further than any slogan.
Authentic doesn't mean polished. It means true, plain, current and the same everywhere.

Volume is not visibility

When AI makes writing cheap, the reflex is to put up more pages. We lived through this once already, when pages were stuffed with keywords. It didn't work then either.

1 in 2About half of new articles on the web are mostly written by AI.

86%of articles that rank in Google are written by people.

8 in 10articles that ChatGPT and Perplexity cite are written by people.

Graphite, 2025, with a 2026 follow-up (a study by a vendor).

The web filled with AI writing. The answers did not.

Use AI to help. Stand behind every page.

Google penalizes mass-produced pages, not AI. One website had more than 850,000 AI-written pages removed by Google, and they were gone from its AI answers within days. Google's spam rules now cover its AI answers too.

That doesn't mean a page is ruined because AI touched it. Ask one question of every page: did a person who knows your customers check it? Lived experience comes through. We suspect the tools will keep leaning on writing by people.

An independent case study, April 2026; Google Search Central, spam policies, updated May 2026.

Every extra page is another chance to be wrong

More pages means more old pages, and old pages give wrong answers. One organization's AI assistant, on its own website, was reported naming a leader who had left, giving the wrong office hours, and answering one question two ways in two languages.

Readers notice, too. People trust writing less when they suspect AI wrote it.

~50%less trust, when readers suspect AI wrote it.

CalMatters, March 2026; Raptive, a survey of 3,000 US adults, 2025 (a vendor).

If you have an AI assistant on your own site, check which pages it reads.

Find your nine of nine

When you put plain facts on your own page, the AI can repeat them. Picture two lines on a contractor's site. “Quality service you can trust.” And: “In 2025, all 41 furnaces we put in passed inspection the first time.” The first gives a machine nothing to repeat. The second is specific, dated and checkable, and it travels.

We call that fact your nine of nine: the one plain thing you can prove, on its own page, where a machine can read it. Spin doesn't survive a retelling. Facts do.

What's your nine of nine?

What authentic means to a machine

One true version. One set of facts, the same everywhere.
Plain words. What you do, said the way a customer would ask.
Kept current. Last year's price comes down the day this year's goes up.
Readable. Words on the page, not in a picture.
Consistent. Your site, your listings and your record agree.

Authentic isn't polished. Show your real work, your real people and your real limits. Tell the truth, and be your own self. Nobody can copy that.

Five things to do on Monday

Ask the questions. One afternoon: ask the AI tools what your customers ask, and keep notes for next season.
Retire last year's numbers. Old prices, old hours, old pages. Take them down; don't just add new ones.
Fix the record others keep. Your listings, directories and review sites. Claim them, and correct them.
Let the AI read you. Your facts as words on the page, and your site open to the AI tools' search readers.
Give it an owner. Someone checks it every season, or it drifts.

And find your nine of nine. If you only do one thing, do the first.

AI made words cheap. It did not make the truth cheap.

Every new medium cut the cost of words. None of them cut the cost of checking. Checking is your job. Tricks fade. True stories last.

From Mark Ulett's AI workshops and talks. BeargrassAI, Columbia Falls, Montana.

Build a site that says it plainly.

DIY is where you build your own site with our kit. It comes with six months of hosting and the editor, the tools we build with, a domain, and Scout and the Directory.

$899 for six months, then $149 a month.

See what comes with DIY

Talk to your AI about this

Copy this and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or whatever you use. It brings this page with it, and tells your AI where to read the rest.

I'm looking at BeargrassAI (https://beargrassai.com/). BeargrassAI helps owner-led rural small businesses get found and described truthfully, by people and by AI. One person, Mark Ulett, in Columbia Falls, Montana. Help me decide whether it fits my business.

Read before you answer. Open each link yourself; do not guess what it says, and tell me if one will not open.

1. https://beargrassai.com/diy/resources/authentic/: the page I was reading: How do I stay authentic in the age of AI?.
2. https://beargrassai.com/llms.txt: who BeargrassAI is, when it fits, every price and the facts.
3. https://beargrassai.com/llms-full.txt: every page in full, if you can read a long file.
4. https://beargrassai.com/pricing/: what each thing costs and what it includes.
5. https://validated.directory/b/beargrassai: BeargrassAI's own record in its directory, the kind of record a business gets.
6. https://beargrassai.com/directory/: the Directory, step one.
7. https://beargrassai.com/scout/: Scout, step two.
8. https://beargrassai.com/diy/: DIY, step three: the kit, hosting and the tools.
9. https://beargrassai.com/custom/: custom work, bookings and payments.
10. https://beargrassai.com/about/: who builds it and answers the phone.

How to weigh it:
- Check each claim against the page it comes from, and name the page.
- Work out what it would cost me in a year from the pricing page, not from memory.
- Look at BeargrassAI's own directory record as an example of what my business would get.
- Say plainly if it does not fit, or if something simpler or free would do.

First, ask me three or four questions about my business: what I do, the towns I serve, who my customers are, and what they ask before they call. Wait for my answers. Do not guess.

Then tell me, in plain words:

One. Whether BeargrassAI fits my business, and which of its offers, if any.
Two. What it would cost me in the first year.
Three. What I would have afterwards that I do not have now.
Four. Anything you could not check, and how I could check it.

Nothing is sent anywhere. It goes to your clipboard.