Michael King Is Making Sure Culture Keeps The Digital Receipts.
“Document yourself or get flattened,” Michael King declares. “Great content that no machine can find might as well not exist.”
King, founder and CEO of iPullRank, has spent his career figuring out what the machine makes visible, and just as crucial, what it erases.
If AI only reflects what already exists online, the undocumented vanish. Not because it wasn’t real, but simply because nobody wrote it down where a system could index it.
He puts it simply: “People imagine a person in the machine weighing what’s true and important. There’s not. It’s a mirror that reflects who publishes the most, gets cited the most, and who structures their information the best.”
King has crafted search strategy for global giants, including American Express, HSBC, Adidas, and Etsy, and now his community benefits. “I’ve spent my career reverse-engineering how these systems actually behave, and the gap between public guidance and observable mechanics is wide.”
For King, this isn’t just business. It’s personal.
UndergroundHipHop.com is currently offline. It was a 20-plus-year digital archive of independent Black music and culture that went dark when operations folded, driving King to step in. Michael King bought the domain and database to rescue that catalog from permanent digital erasure. “That archive exists because people documented themselves, everywhere they could, instead of waiting for permission,” he says. “Same playbook applies now. Document yourself or get flattened.”
Documentation alone won’t save the record. “A site nobody links to, cites, or talks about is a museum with no front door,” King says. “The machines won’t find it and neither will people.”
“Build around the archive,” King says. “Transcribe oral histories, because text is what these systems eat. Then convert them into video, podcast episodes, and clips that live where people actually spend time. Get your elders on YouTube telling stories in their own words so machines understand who, what, when, and why.”
While AI is now directing traffic that publishers built platforms on, content creators are securing power. “They have what publishers are losing: direct relationships with audiences and trust that doesn’t route through a homepage,” King says. “The models will increasingly learn from them because they’ll increasingly be the ones still publishing.”
Algorithm fixes won’t save the communities being left out. “Non-English speakers, communities whose history lives in oral tradition or physical media, anyone not producing crawlable, citable content across channels” are most at risk, King argues. “The communities that get left out of AI will be the ones that assume someone else is keeping the receipts.”
For King, the ultimate issue isn’t just visibility, it is economic.
“If a system builds its answer on someone’s work, that person deserves credit that actually sends people their way, not a footnote nobody clicks,” King says. “If these companies are monetizing the sum of human creativity, the creators need a cut of that value, not a thank-you note.”
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