It's worth getting ahead of because you don't want it to escalate vis-a-vis other gov agencies. Outreach to editors @ various outlets is going to be important. If you want to go the extra mile, maybe it makes sense to try to talk to and work with HI SOC? (But I'd want to know more about your situation.)
This is something that's good to catch early so you know that it's an ongoing thing you'll have to deal with. Investing in your branding means it's an ongoing investment (esp. in B2G, which places a premium on trust).
Also, if you're losing business because of this, it -may- actually make sense to talk to a lawyer at some point. You can't blame HI SOC for flagging (at least, that's what I suspect), but the news reports seem to vary in terms of how responsible their reporting is.
Question Number 1 through Infinity: Is this impacting your business? Actually? Today?
I'd suggest keeping an eye on things but not getting too bent out of shape. The video didn't call your company a scam; it said that scammers have been using your domain. And the news has gotten pretty limited reach, mostly in a small news market -- and a bit in the niche market of cybersecurity. Kicking up too much of a stink, especially ineffectually, might create a Streisand Effect.
If it is impacting your business, then the answer you perhaps don't want to hear: This is crisis comms. This is a job for a PR/crisis comms agency.
If you can't afford one, you're going to have to fake your way through some heavy lifting. Press releases, pitching reporters, etc.
I'd focus, in part, on making people comfortable with the idea of your project and your vision as something normal and safe. I wouldn't draw DOGE comparisons. "DOGE" is a four-letter word to a lot of people.
Separately, you may have legal options -- vis-a-vis defamation or other matters: KHON seems to be saying that links ending with codify.inc "always" indicates a scam. If that's not true, that's something probably correctable. (But that doesn't mean you need to necessarily drop a fat retainer on a lawyer's desk if you're not looking to collect $$$. An email to a relevant editor could sort that out.)
The problem was less the scale of supply and more the scale of demand.
In the 19th century, economist William Stanley Jevons found that, as coal became more readily and easily available, demand for it went up. This was counter to the theories of others, and the principle became known as Jevons Paradox.
Jevons Paradox (a concept that is widely misunderstood, especially when it comes to tech and finance bros talking about AI) demonstrates that, a resource becomes more abundant and easily accessible, demand for that resource rises. As the web took off, people hungered more and more for digital content -- especially as internet accessibility became faster and cheaper.
To keep up -- and to pay for being able to keep up -- increasingly sophisticated monetization models were introduced.
In any case, ad models are one thing. But it's the data brokering that's even more insidious.
The irony is that if internet content were harder to access, the population on the whole wouldn't want it as much.
Now, the culmination of Jevons Paradox has spun itself around a bit in this case. We now live in a world where those profiting off of ad models and data brokering actively try to get people to demand internet content more. (Look no further than the recent social-media-addiction lawsuits.)
If we assume a YMYL label, I can't guarantee this will fix your problems, but here are a few immediate steps you could take.
- Byline your content and include biographical information. "Lilouartz Smith is a supplement researcher in Anywhere, USA, focused on delivering top health-supplement information to blah blah blah" or whatever. Something along those lines. Google wants to see that you're some kind of authority and not some nameless faceless SEO hack or charlatan.
- If you have sources you can cite for anything (even if it's just a backlink to, like, a New York Times article relevant to some tangential point you're making), do so.
- Make sure your entires are dated and there's some kind of trackable update history in your content.
The only other thing I'll say: It's also possible that SGE is killing your site (i.e., the Google Gemini summaries). That's been happening with MANY sites for a while now; people aren't clicking through anymore on Google results because the AI search gives them a high-level overview in a sentence or two. There's not a lot you can do about that.
You could aggressively pursue an AIO strategy by posting regularly about your site and information in sources that AI loves to reference (Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, etc.). But that won't get you site visitors necessarily; it will just maybe get you more citations in GenAI.
I'm MUCH older than you. I definitely don't have life all figured out, but I have the benefit of many years of experience and mistakes (and a few small successes).
The MOST IMPORTANT thing that matters long term of all the things you have listed is your health.
Physical, mental, emotional.
Based on your description of things and my interpretation thereof: You are working too hard and playing too hard. And stressed that you're not working harder and playing harder. Chill, bro. Pull back. Something's got to give. If you don't choose what to pull back on, your body is going to choose for you.
I know what you mean about the last couple of things you've said. I too have had to truncate long streaks of working out because of injuries or health problems. Do what you can. You don't need to push yourself unnecessarily; just literally do what you can. If you're not "back to your old self" just yet, don't try to force it. The idea is to do better -- not to be perfect.
And for crying out loud, spend some time away from screens. Go outside (it's a cliche because it's true), take walks, look at birds, read a book for fun, maybe meditate. (Sometimes you have to focus on nothing before you can focus on anything.) If you don't have the time for it? Make the time for it. The emails businesses and the emails will wait. The girlfriend, if she's at all decent, will wait. And your schoolwork won't suffer.
One of the big follies of college is about putting an immense amount of pressure on teenagers. Putting that kind of pressure on yourself is a recipe for mishaps and mistakes. It's okay to take that pressure off of yourself. Twenty years from now you will not look back and regret not being able to do it all perfectly -- but you are at risk of regretting not focusing more on one thing and less on another thing.
And you'll definitely regret letting your health suffer if you don't take care of yourself.
If these ideas make the high-achiever part of you feel guilty or otherwise bad, consider: It's one thing if you're working hard for a particular goal and you're making a short-term sacrifice in service of that long-term payoff. But everything you're doing is so all over the place, it all seems long-term, and nothing you've said indicates that you even have a clearly defined goal. Until you have a clearly defined goal, you are subjecting yourself to noise.
Of course, you're 18. If you don't 100% know what your goals are right now, that's okay. And you're bound to err. And you're bound to make a wrong turn and have to correct. That's fine. That's normal. That's expected. Part of being 18 is figuring out your goals.
That means putting yourself in a place where you can mindfully explore and figure things out. And you can't do that well without taking good care of yourself. Take care of yourself like someone you are responsible for caring for. If you wouldn't let your son or your daughter or your pet go through a particular kind of strife, don't allow it for yourself.
I doubt this happened here, but FWIW, AI does have a habit of "cleaning up" (read: hallucinating) interview transcript quotes if you ask it to go through a transcript and pull quotes. You have to prompt AI very specifically to get it to not "clean up" the quotes when you ask it to do that task.
I think the argument lies in its flexibility and versatility (regardless of it being the most efficient or effective tool for this one particular task).
Duct tape is awesome for the same reason -- even though there are several effective use cases for duct tape where a different tool would technically be "better" for the job.
As the examples demonstrate, this is trying to solve an invented problem with a far more complicated solution (conversational agentic AI) that itself is prone to its own failures and weaknesses.
My boomer-ish quibble, therefore, is that the old way of "endless menus" actually -worked-. Was it a pain in the butt? Sure. But it wasn't really "endless". There was a light at the end of the tunnel.
The designer's quest for everything to be "clean" led to the mess that we have now. Form over function.
Now it's a world of "Not that icon. This one. Nope. Just kidding. THIS one. What do you mean you can't see it? Those are absolutely two different shades of green-brown and you should be able to." And a world of "You just have to go in the settings menu. No, not THAT settings menu. The OTHER settings menu."
Needing AI for this says less about the capabilities of AI and more about how broken the world of UI has become, IMHO.
If I want to be called Bill or Frank or Jill or Dr. Fukuyama or President Trump or the Grand Poobah of All That He Surveys by my private, personal-use GenAI account, who cares???
I'm with you. Also, sometimes I'm specifically looking for some dusty old site that has long been forgotten about. Maybe I'm trying to find something I remember from ages ago. Or maybe I'm trying to deeply research something.
There's a lot more to fixing search than prioritizing recency. In fact, I think recency bias sometimes makes search worse.
Agreed. This is a common issue across all functionalities, industries, etc. Anything that's disruptable has some underlying issue that needs solving for -- as opposed to solving for the disruption itself.
This is something that's good to catch early so you know that it's an ongoing thing you'll have to deal with. Investing in your branding means it's an ongoing investment (esp. in B2G, which places a premium on trust).
Also, if you're losing business because of this, it -may- actually make sense to talk to a lawyer at some point. You can't blame HI SOC for flagging (at least, that's what I suspect), but the news reports seem to vary in terms of how responsible their reporting is.
But that's maybe an issue for another day.