Monday Question: What Does AI Say About You?
This Monday's question is one you can answer in two minutes, and most business owners have never asked it:
What does ChatGPT say your business does?
Open a fresh chat. Ask it the way a stranger would: "what does [your company] do?" Then do the same in Gemini and Claude.
Most people are unpleasantly surprised, and rarely in a dramatic way. The answers are usually wrong in the quiet way that's harder to catch: a service you retired two years ago, a description that misses your actual differentiator, a location that used to be true, occasionally a confident sentence about something you've never done.
Here's why it happens. An AI assistant doesn't know your business. It searches, retrieves whatever content looks relevant, and writes a fluent answer from what it found. The writing is always polished. The retrieval is where the trouble lives, because retrieval finds what's findable, not what's true. If a directory listing from 2021 is easier to parse than your homepage, that listing wins, and the assistant has no way of knowing it lost.
The part that should concern you: this is already the first impression for a growing share of the people evaluating you, before a call, before a form fill, before they ever reach your actual site. And the failure is invisible by default. Nobody emails to say an AI described you wrong.
The same mechanism explains why a broken link quietly removes you from an AI's picture of your business, and it's the outward-facing version of why Copilot gives brilliant answers in one company and confident nonsense in another. Different surfaces, one pattern: these systems only know what they can actually reach.
Ask the question today. What you find tells you whether this is urgent.
If you'd rather know than guess, the audit is a service I run directly.
Rosemarie Withee has spent thirteen years helping operations teams get real work out of their software, first Microsoft 365, now AI. She’s written six books for Wiley and builds AI products at Portal Integrators.