> AI answers about me got a founding year wrong, invented a company rename, and doubted a real award. Each traced to a page, and the archive settled the rest.
>
> Source: https://gerriscorp.com/case-studies/founder-record/ · Updated 2026-10-14 · By Chris Abraham, Gerris Corp

# A founder's public record: tracing AI errors to the pages behind them

In October 2026 I checked what Claude and Google's AI Mode say about me. Most of it was right. Four things were wrong or doubted: the year Gerris Corp started, a company rename that never happened, two-year-old freelance figures, and a Forbes ranking the answer called unconfirmed. Every one traced to a specific page, three of them pages I had written myself, and the Wayback Machine confirmed the award the answers doubted.

## My role

The subject and the investigator. It is the same work I do for founders and executives whose public record has drifted, done on my own name so nothing has to be redacted.

## The errors and where they came from

**The founding year.** One answer said I started Gerris Corp in 2007. Gerris started in 2012; 2007 is when Mark Harrison and I launched Abraham Harrison. The answer quoted my own About page, which listed both companies and both years in one sentence. The model kept the first year and attached it to the second company. I gave each company its own line and its own year.

**The rename.** Google's AI Mode reported that I run "Gerris Digital (formerly Gerris Corp)." No rename ever happened. The name Gerris Digital appeared on three pages of chrisabraham.com, my personal archive, and one of those pages is a long biography written by an AI research tool, which says Abraham Harrison "merged with other entities to form Gerris Corp (Gerris Digital)." Faced with two names for one firm, the answer engine reconciled them by inventing a history. The fix is one name everywhere, and a correction note on the AI-written page.

**The stale figures.** Freelance figures from two years earlier, a higher status tier than I hold and smaller job and hour counts, came from a single profile page on the same archive. One page, three wrong facts.

**The doubted award.** My bios have long said Forbes named me a top 50 social media power influencer. One answer flagged it as unconfirmed because no bio linked a source. The original Forbes contributor post from January 25, 2012, is archived in the Wayback Machine, and the list shows me at number 33. The claim was true and unproven. Linking the archived list proves it.

## Corroborating the rest

The same archive work confirmed details the answers repeated correctly but without independent support: Advertising Age's April 2008 introduction of its DigitalNext bloggers, which describes me as president of Abraham Harrison, specializing in blogger outreach and search-reputation management, and living in Berlin and Washington; and my November 2008 Ad Age column written from Berlin. Ad Age's site blocks automated readers, so the archived copies are the citable versions.

## What it shows

Answer engines are faithful to their sources, including the careless ones. A sentence with two entities and two dates can hand a model the wrong pair. An AI-written bio published as a curiosity becomes a source for the next AI. An old profile page outranks a current one when nothing tells the crawler which is newer. And a true claim with no link reads to a model like an unsupported one. Each problem has a mechanical fix, and every fix starts with finding the page.

My guides cover the method: [fact checking a confident AI answer](https://gerriscorp.com/guides/fact-check-ai-seo/) claim by claim, and [citation gap analysis](https://gerriscorp.com/guides/citation-gap-analysis/) for the sources that leave you out. For founders and executives, see [reputation and perception management](https://gerriscorp.com/services/reputation/).

Written by [Chris Abraham](https://gerriscorp.com/about/), founder of Gerris Corp in Arlington, Virginia, from his own client engagements, with every technical claim checked against the documentation listed. Websites since 1994, digital marketing since 2002. [Editorial standards](https://gerriscorp.com/standards/) · [Upwork profile](https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/chrisjabraham)

Updated October 14, 2026