What Is AI Saying About Your Brand? How to Find Out and Change It If It’s Wrong
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By Kesha Lien, Brand Strategist at Brickhouse. Kesha helps service-based founders, teams, and independent professionals build distinctively human brands so they can thrive in the era of AI.
A potential client opens ChatGPT and types: “Who should I hire for [your service] in [your industry]?” Your name comes up. But the description is wrong. Wrong audience. Outdated services. A generic summary that makes you sound like every other provider in your category.
Most service businesses and independent professionals don’t know this is happening.
What AI Gets Wrong About Your Brand
AI doesn’t always get you factually wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t have enough specific information to describe you with accuracy. The result: a generic description that could apply to anyone in your category.
Both are problems worth knowing about. Generic descriptions are a signal problem, covered in How to AI-Proof Your Brand. The four signs below are accuracy problems.
AI gets your audience wrong. You work with founder-led service companies. AI says you serve “small businesses.” You work with independent professionals. AI doesn’t mention them.
AI describes services you no longer offer. Old website copy, outdated directory listings, and archived guest bios don’t disappear. AI reads all of it.
AI conflates you with a competitor. When two providers have similar positioning, AI lumps them together. Your expertise gets attributed to someone else.
AI presents outdated positioning. If you’ve repositioned, raised your rates, or shifted your focus, the old signals are still accumulating.
When any of these is true, your AI brand presence is working against you.
How to Audit What AI Says About Your Brand
Run this audit quarterly. Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and search by name; your name and your business name. Document what comes back.
“What is [your business name] known for?”
“Who is [your name] and what do they do?”
“What services does [your business name] offer?”
What To Look For
Three things from each response: Is the description accurate? Are your services current? Is the language specific to you, or generic?
Copy the results and save them. You need a baseline before you can measure progress.
Check Your External Presence
AI builds its picture of your brand from every source it can find. Check that your audience, services, and positioning are described the same way on your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, industry directories, and guest bios. Gaps and contradictions between these sources are what often produce inaccurate descriptions.
This audit checks the accuracy of what AI says when someone searches for you by name. If you want to know whether AI recommends you in category searches, that’s a visibility question. Start with How to AI-Proof Your Brand: Why Positioning & Authenticity Matter More Than Ever.
How to Change What AI Says When It Gets It Wrong
Start With Your Homepage
Your homepage typically carries more weight than any other page. Does your hero section clearly state who you are, who you serve, and what you do? If the answer is vague or generic, fix this first.
Update Your Highest-Authority Sources
Google Business Profile and LinkedIn carry significant weight in how AI understands your brand. Update all three: your website, Google Business Profile, and LinkedIn, with the same language. Then add Organization schema markup to your homepage. It is a small piece of code that connects your website to your LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and directory listings so search engines and AI tools recognize them as one business. Google AI Overviews respond fastest to this kind of structured data.
Submit Feedback Directly
When you run your audit in Google, check the AI Overview for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down option. If the description is wrong, submit a comment explaining the error. If it’s right, thumbs up. ChatGPT and Perplexity have similar feedback mechanisms. These small actions add up.
Build Signals Across New Sources
Updating your website doesn’t erase old signals. You need new content. Add your business to authority directories and any industry-specific platforms where your clients search for providers. Publish LinkedIn content that uses specific language about your expertise and who you serve. LinkedIn is among the top sources cited by major AI. Pitch guest articles and podcast appearances where your bio will consistently describe your work in specific terms.
ChatGPT weights accumulated third-party mentions above most other signals. These take six to eighteen months to compound.
Run The Audit Again in 90 days
AI doesn’t update in real time. Give new signals time to accumulate, then check again. The description should be sharper.
💡 Sage Advice
You can't control what AI says about your brand. You can influence it, and that influence compounds.
The brands that show up with accurate, specific descriptions in AI aren't lucky. They have clear positioning, consistent language across every source AI reads, and a habit of running this audit. They know what AI is saying about them. They correct it when it drifts.
That's the work. Clear positioning gives AI something specific to say. Consistency means every source reinforces the same story. Regular audits catch drift before it costs you a client. None of it is complicated. All of it requires intention.
