Reddit Tricked Google AI Into Inventing Duskbloods Bosses

Nobody has played The Duskbloods. The game's first closed network test doesn't start until August, and FromSoftware hasn't revealed a single boss. None of that stopped Google's AI from confidently telling searchers about Lycan Vrykolakas, Blood Mistress Elizabeth, and a character called Bugout Billy, complete with lore details and unlock methods. Every one of them is fake, invented by shitposters on r/TheDuskbloods.

As Ian Walker at Video Game Town explained, the subreddit has been running with elaborate joke posts for weeks, filling the void left by a lack of official information. One user posted a fully ranked tier list of bosses, complete with enough lore and gameplay detail to fool anyone who didn't know the game was unreleased. Google's AI Overview scraped those posts, failed to register that the game doesn't exist in playable form yet, and served the results as fact. A post from two months ago had already poisoned the well, with fabricated bosses like Sanguiphisto and Orlac appearing in AI-generated search answers.

The results aren't even consistent. Searching for "confirmed Duskbloods bosses" sometimes returns a correct disclaimer that none have been announced, while slightly rephrasing the query gets Google to present Lycan Vrykolakas as a real enemy you can fight. Ask it to describe Bugout Billy's abilities and it will pull from the Reddit post, identify the source, and still present the fake information without ever flagging it as made up. It's a perfect demonstration of how AI search treats confidence as a substitute for accuracy.

This is funny because it's a video game subreddit having a laugh, but the underlying problem is serious. A Cloudflare report published this month found that human web traffic declined by as much as 40% across major industries between June 2025 and April 2026, driven largely by Google scraping content for its AI Overview instead of sending users to the source. As Adweek reported, publishers who try to opt out of AI scraping also get removed from Google's search index entirely, since the company uses one crawler for both. The Duskbloods situation is a joke version of a system that's actively breaking the web.

Meanwhile, the actual game opened network test applications today, running through July 28, with five four-hour play sessions scheduled between August 21-24. FromSoftware says The Duskbloods will release by the end of 2026. Maybe by then Google will have figured out which bosses are real.