What Does AI Say About Your Company?

Can I check this right now?

You can. Asking ChatGPT or Perplexity three questions shows exactly how your company is being described today.

Ask them in order. First, your company name on its own. Second, your company name together with your industry. Third, drop the company name and ask the way a customer would ask. Something like "who can do small-batch injection moulding near Leeds".

The third question matters most. Customers search without knowing your company name. The ones who already know it will find you anyway.

Answers usually fall into one of four kinds. It describes you accurately / it states something false / you are absent and competitors appear / it does not know you at all. Which one you get decides what to do next, so identify that first.

Why would AI not know my company at all?

Usually because AI cannot read the site, which is a settings problem rather than a marketing or content problem.

Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in its AI features, and that a page needs to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet(Google Search Central, AI features and your website). In other words, a site that does not show up properly in Google Search will not show up in AI answers either.

ChatGPT has one more setting. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt to appear in search answers, and states that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers(OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers). OpenAI also notes it can take around 24 hours for a robots.txt change to take effect, so do not expect an instant difference.

Ask whoever maintains the site two questions: is the site indexed in Google, and does robots.txt block AI crawlers? For most companies the problem ends there.

What do I do when AI describes my company incorrectly?

AI answers from what exists on the web, so when your own site does not state the facts plainly, older and less accurate sources fill the gap.

A trade description from a registration document, a press release from a decade ago, the address of a branch that closed, an old switchboard number. If any of that is still somewhere on the web, AI treats it as evidence too. When your site does not describe itself clearly, an older and less accurate source takes that place instead.

The fix is plain. Make the first sentence of your about page state where you are, who you serve, and what you do. Write your product range, the areas you cover, your typical customers and your contact details as sentences. Text inside images and inside a PDF company profile is not read reliably.

If instead you want to limit how your content appears, Google documents nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls(Google Search Central). Those reduce exposure; they do not correct what is said.

Why do competitors appear when we do not?

Answering a question that does not name a company requires information AI can compare, and that information is on their site and not on yours.

To answer "who should I use for X in Y", the system has to weigh candidates against each other. Weighing requires something to weigh. Volumes you handle, lead times, sizes and specifications you carry, certifications you hold, areas you cover — the things a buyer actually checks — have to be written as sentences before you can be a candidate.

If your site says "outstanding quality" and "customer satisfaction", there is nothing to compare. If a competitor's site says "low-volume high-mix, no minimum order, same-day quotes across the region", they go into the answer. Not because they are better, but because they wrote it in a form the answer can use.

So what this case calls for is not a new website. It is writing down facts you already know.

What to hand to your team today

One check and three instructions complete the first stage, and none of it costs money.

• Ask the questions yourself. Run the three above and screenshot the answers. That becomes your baseline for judging any later change.
• Have someone verify two things. Whether the site is indexed in Google, and whether robots.txt blocks AI crawlers.
• Rewrite the first sentence of your about page. Where you are, who you serve, what you do. Drop the adjectives.
• Write down your selection criteria. Put the things buyers ask you on the page, in the words they use.

Then ask again. Even if the answer has not changed, you have narrowed the cause, which makes the next step obvious.

Sources

• AI Features and Your Website — Google Search Central
• Overview of OpenAI Crawlers — OpenAI
• Google's Guide to Optimizing for Generative AI Features on Google Search — Google Search Central