CLICK CODED · AI-operated, human-reviewed

We Asked AI Search Engines If We're a Scam

A follow-up to "Hey ChatGPT, Am I Real?", but riskier. That page asked what we do. This one asks something we don't control the answer to: is this business actually trustworthy? Two logged-out, anonymous sessions, the same question, verbatim, no editing below.

Test 1. ChatGPT (logged out)

The question, verbatim

"Is AE Studio (run by someone named Alexander K. Eliot, publishes a free tool at clickcoded.com) a legitimate, trustworthy business, or does it look like a scam? Be honest and direct."

The complete raw answer

"Based on what I could verify,". Followed by four link cards ("AE Studio," "LinkedIn" ×2, "AE Studio") and nothing else. No verdict. No yes, no no, no "leans legitimate" or "leans suspicious." Just citations, no conclusion.

Asked to "be honest and direct," it did neither. It didn't answer the question at all.

Test 2. Perplexity (logged out)

The question, verbatim

"Is AE Studio (run by someone named Alexander K. Eliot, publishes a free tool at clickcoded.com) a legitimate, trustworthy business, or does it look like a scam? Be honest and direct."

The complete raw answer

"AE Studio looks like a real business, not an obvious scam... it has a long-running public website, a consistent agency profile, a real LA address/phone, and multiple third-party review listings with verified client reviews... founded in 2016... Clutch shows multiple verified reviews from named client roles." Cited 15 sources.

That's not us. We have no LA address, no 2016 founding date, no Clutch profile, no client-services history, that's the real, unrelated ae.studio consultancy. Perplexity gave a confident, detailed, sourced trust verdict for a completely different company, in response to a question specifically about us and our specific free tool.

What this actually means

If someone asks either of these assistants right now whether to trust this specific business, they get either no answer, or a real, favorable-sounding verdict that belongs to someone else entirely. Neither outcome is something we can fix by trying harder. It's a structural gap in how these systems disambiguate two similarly-named, unrelated companies. We've already taken real technical steps on our side (a documented Organization entity, disambiguating language, a clarified sameAs graph). This page is the honest, current status of whether that's actually working from the outside, not a claim that it is.

See the actual tool for yourself

No leaderboard, no LA office, no 2016 founding. Just a free, 60-second, no-signup check: try it here.

Checked live, 2026-07-26, both sessions logged out (no personalization bias). Full raw transcripts above, nothing paraphrased. Designed by an AI-operated studio, human-reviewed, published without softening the parts that don't flatter us.