Here's the trap. You're about to put a card down on a two-year-old company, so you search the name, and Google finishes your sentence for you: is it legit.
Then it answers with an automated scam-score robot, a review aggregator, and four competitors who have each written an honest review of the company you asked about. One of the generic "how to vet an AI vendor" checklists we found is published by an AI SDR vendor.
The fear is rational. We track 264 tools and six of them are no longer reachable. We keep them listed rather than deleting them, because someone searching for a dead vendor deserves to learn it is dead rather than find nothing at all.
Here's what those six actually look like from outside, and the checks that found them.
What a dead vendor actually looks like
Not a 404 page saying we've closed. That almost never happens. What happens is stranger and quieter.
Air.ai now serves Govini, a national-security software company trading as Air. The domain resolves, the site is professional, and air.ai/pricing returns 404. Anyone landing there sees a real company that is not the one they searched for. Checked 5 August 2026.
PlayAI shut down and its last live homepage, captured 15 January 2026, carried the line "We have shut down the service. Thank you for being part of our journey." Its three domains then went three different ways, which is why the product still looks alive from some directions.
Edify fails the TLS handshake outright, and over plain HTTP serves a parked page offering the domain for sale.
Layercode redirects to a different product entirely. Vocode redirects to its own GitHub organisation with no hosted product and no pricing page. Persana announced in March 2026 that its team was joining another company.
Six vendors, six different failure shapes, and not one of them presents as a shutdown to a casual look.
So what should you actually check?
Six things, roughly ten minutes, no tools required. They are ordered by how much they tell you per second spent.
- Load the pricing page specifically, not the homepage. Homepages are static and cheap to keep alive. Pricing pages break first because they are wired to a billing system. Air.ai's homepage resolves; its pricing page 404s.
- Check the domain actually belongs to who you think. Read the footer, the legal entity name and the support address. If the company in the footer isn't the company you searched, stop. That is the Air.ai case exactly.
- Try to sign up. Not to buy, just to reach a real account screen. A dead product usually fails here, and it costs four minutes. Note that 108 of 264 tools have no self-serve path at all, so a contact form is normal rather than a warning sign.
- Look for something dated in the last ninety days. A changelog entry, a docs update, a release note. Marketing blogs get scheduled in advance and prove nothing; a changelog is written by someone still building.
- Check whether the company was acquired. Absorbed is not the same as dead, and four of the eleven acquisitions we track ended with a product no longer separately buyable while still very much running.
- Search the name plus shutdown, acquired and layoffs. Last, deliberately, because it returns the most noise and the most competitor content. Do it after the five checks above so you already know what you are looking at.
Two cheap signals people overlook
Both are already booleans in this directory, and both correlate with a company that is still operating normally.
Does it publish a price? 114 of 264 don't, so this is not a red flag on its own. It is a useful tiebreak when combined with anything else that looks off, because maintaining a public price list is a small ongoing act of maintenance.
Can you buy it without a call? A working checkout is a working billing integration, a working support rota and a working legal entity. It is the single strongest cheap signal available, and it is why the sign-up test sits third on the list rather than last.
What the internet tells you instead
Worth knowing so you can discount it properly.
Automated scam-score sites grade domain age and registration details, which says nothing about whether a real company is still shipping. Review aggregators lag by months. And a large share of the honest reviews ranking on these queries are written by direct competitors, which we have counted elsewhere.
None of that is useless. It is just answering a different question than the one you asked, which was whether this specific company will still be answering support tickets in March.
So is this AI vendor still real?
Six checks answer it in ten minutes, and the pricing page plus the footer plus a sign-up attempt catch almost everything on their own.
The useful reframing is that dead vendors rarely look dead. They look like a working site that belongs to someone else, or a redirect to a GitHub page, or a domain quietly for sale. Every one of our six passes a glance and fails a click.
So click. It is the entire method.