Commitment Is the New Link

In 1998, two Stanford grad students noticed something everyone else missed: hyperlinks are votes. Every time someone links to a page, they're spending a costly resource — their own site's authority — to endorse someone else's. Google counted those votes and built a $2 trillion company. The link worked because it was expensive at scale. You had to build a website, create content worth linking to, and convince another human to connect their reputation to yours. That cost was the trust signal. That cost is now zero. AI generates content, reviews, images, and entire websites at marginal cost approaching nothing. The information layer — everything that can be written, rated, or reviewed — has collapsed into noise. 32% of AI search results about local businesses contain factual errors. 67% of consumers don't fact-check AI recommendations. The loop tightens: hallucination referencing hallucination. Google solved 1996's trust problem by counting links. Nobody has solved 2026's. Two Layers Ever