Does AI know your company?

Somebody mentions a company you do not know. Before you open their site, you ask ChatGPT what it is.

Do the same for your own company. An answer comes back, and it sounds good.

Then ask: where did you get that?

That is where the part worth knowing starts. An answer always comes back, including when the machine has never visited your site. A trade register row and an old Facebook page are enough for a paragraph that sounds right.

The source list tells you what the answer does not. If it shows business directories but not your own site, your description has been assembled from their rows. A directory lists your industry and your home town. Your own site would say what you actually do and who for.

Why a directory beats your own site

A directory says the same thing the same way every time: name, industry, home town, business ID. Dull reading for a person, easy for a machine.

Your own site is usually another matter. The front page has a slogan, the services are in images, and what the company does and who for can be inferred but not read. A machine does not infer. It quotes what is written.

So the directory ends up as the source and your own site is left out.

What has to be readable on the page

Three things, as text and not as an image: what you do, who for, and where. One clear sentence each is enough.

Test it on somebody outside your field. Read the first screen of your front page out loud and ask what they think you sell. If the answer is shaky, the machine is in the same position.

Simple, and that is exactly why it never gets done.

Say the same thing everywhere

If your Facebook page says one thing, your Google business profile another and your own site a third, the machine picks the version that repeats. That is almost always the directory version, because there are many directories and they all say the same.

Go through them once and write the same sentence into each. An hour of work, and a dull one. It is also the point where your own site can overtake the directory, because you are the only one who can say it first and say it right.

Do not expect a result the same day. The machine reads your site again only the next time it looks you up. Ask the same question in a month and see what changed.

Why there is only one check here

A ten-point list never gets done. You read it, nod, close the tab, and by evening it is gone. One you can do right now.

This month we removed a whole section, one form and four categories from our own site, two of which had no articles in them at all. The page got better every time.