New Delhi, Aug. 8 -- SAN FRANCISCO - The game does not have a character named Vantage Tripod. Not yet. The name existed only in a private planning document in the developer's Google Drive, never published, never uploaded to Steam, never mentioned in any public statement. Then a player in the game's Discord server asked Google's AI Search about it, and the answer came back with the character's name inside.

The developer is Klub Kofta Studio, a solo indie developer behind a game called Operation Octo. When fans began running queries through Google's AI Search feature to learn about the game, the answers were mostly wrong. One was not. A community member experimenting for fun, according to the developer's account, typed a question about fut...