The popular mountain bike YouTube channel Berm Peak is not generally known for its hard hitting investigative journalism but when the founder, Seth Alvo, discovered a company advertising laying down pea gravel for bike paths, he decided to give them a ring because it well known that pea gravel is just about the worst surface for biking:
“A company advertised pea gravel for bike paths, which doesn’t make much sense, as it’s impossible to ride on!”
Alvo goes into great detail scrutinizing the company’s marketing claims and explains why pea gravel is a senseless choice for bike path construction. Alvo used to build websites back in the early 2000s and believes the comically bad suggestion of pea gravel bike paths was caused by the company using AI to generate tons of webpages to create “search engine food”:
“They used AI to create a whole bunch of different web pages on every type of gravel for every type of project so that if somebody was searching it, it would come up. And the SEO company they hired was extremely lazy. Just sent out AI agents to do it all with zero human oversight or at least oversight from a human who knows anything about building mediums. And the result is hilarious.”
Alvo reached out to the company for clarification and this was their response:
“Hello Gravel called me—and they were cool as heck. They acknowledged their mistake, informed me that they have immediately removed the web page, and also informed me that they are doing an audit of other similar pages to eliminate misinformation. They essentially apologized to the entire bicycling community, acknowledging that this misinformation could have potentially guided the decisions of well-meaning land owners who want to provide bike paths for visitors. Folks, that’s a masterclass in PR. Own it. Do something about it. Very cool.” -Seth Alvo
Thankfully the company fully owned up to their mistake and have taken down the potentially dangerous offering.
