BoolAIn: A Field Guide to Getting What You Asked For from AI Search

AI search assistants now stand between most people and the written record, and they routinely do three things a search box never did: they rewrite the question, they answer adifferent question than the one asked, and they state with full confidence that things donot exist when they do. This guide teaches BoolAIn literacy, the Boolean discipline ofexact terms and explicit instructions carried through a layer that has AI in the middle of it.It gives eight rules on a single card, the exact wording to type for each, the places to gowhen the interface fails, and a ten-minute test any reader can run on any AI search to seethe failures for themselves. The rules were developed from documented sessions on four commercial systems in September 2026, in which a coined term was silently corrected to a common word, a direct question about an author returned a summary with the author removed, a co-author was renamed and defended against the primary record, and an indexed repository record was declared nonexistent by two systems in succession. This guide is written for the general reader, the student, the researcher, the analyst, programmers, and anyone whose work depends on retrieving the thing they asked for rather than the thing the system preferred.