Is AI Getting Your Business Wrong?
A Guide to Auditing Your AI Footprint
A prospective client types a question into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity before they ever visit your website. "What does [Company] do?" "Is [Company] still in business?" "How much does [Company] charge?" The AI answers confidently. You, however, have no idea what it just told them, or if it’s even right.
If you haven’t updated your website in a while, AI may be sharing wrong information about your company.
This is the risk behind the AI search boom. People are increasingly using AI chat tools the way they used to use Google: as a first stop for research on a company, a vendor, or a service provider. Unlike a Google search, though, an AI-generated answer doesn't come with a list of blue links you can scan for yourself. It comes as a single, authoritative-sounding paragraph. If that paragraph is wrong, most people never think to question it.
We want to start asking ourselves “What does AI say about my company?”, because up to 40% of reputation issues are coming from AI summaries. (1)
Why AI Gets Businesses Wrong
Thin or outdated web presence. If your website hasn't been updated in a while, or if your services, pricing, or positioning have changed since your last content refresh, an AI tool pulling from your site (or from older cached versions of it) may describe a version of your business that no longer exists.
Conflicting information across the web. AI tools often synthesize information from multiple sources, your website, directory listings, old press mentions, review sites, a former employee's LinkedIn post. If those sources disagree, the AI has to guess which one is right, and it doesn't always guess correctly.
No structured facts to draw from. Search engines and AI tools both do better when a business's core facts, services offered, service area, pricing model, founding date, leadership, are stated clearly and consistently, ideally with structured data markup behind the scenes. A site that only communicates this information through vague marketing language or embedded images gives AI very little reliable material to work with.
It only takes about 20 minutes to do an AI audit, and you don’t need anything fancy to make it happen.
Training data versus live retrieval. Some AI tools answer from what they learned during training, which has a cutoff date and no awareness of anything that happened afterward. Others, like Perplexity or browsing-enabled modes of ChatGPT and Gemini, retrieve current information from the live web. A business can be described accurately by one tool and inaccurately by another simply because of how each one sources its answer. For example, OpenAI reported that it’s o3 model hallucinated in response to 33% of questions, and o4-mini hallucinated 48% of the time, which was more often that previous models (2)
How Do You Audit Your Own AI Footprint?
1. Ask AI directly. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, and ask each one: "What does [Your Company] do?" "Who founded [Your Company]?" "What does [Your Company] charge for [your core service]?" Write down what each tool says.
2. Check for basic accuracy. Are your services described correctly? Is your location right? Does it sound like your business still exists and is actively operating?
3. Look for outdated or missing details. Note anything that reflects an old version of your business, a former name, a discontinued service, an old address, etc.
4. Ask about your reputation. Try "What do people say about [Your Company]?" This surfaces whether the AI is pulling from reviews, press, or nothing at all.
5. Repeat quarterly. AI-generated answers can shift as these tools update their models and retrieval sources. A one-time check isn't enough.
What to Do If You Find Errors
You generally can't edit an AI model's answer directly, but you can influence what it draws from:
Update and clarify your own website first. Make sure your services, pricing approach, and key facts are stated in plain, unambiguous text, not just implied through design or imagery.
Add structured data (schema markup) so search engines and AI crawlers can identify your business facts with confidence rather than inferring them.
Keep your Google Business Profile and major directory listings current and consistent with your website.
Address conflicting information where you can, such as outdated directory entries, old press releases, abandoned social profiles.
Build fresh, citable content regularly, since AI tools favor sources that are active and current over ones that appear dormant.
AI mistakes can cause severe damage to a brand’s reputation, making website clarity, schema markup, and fixing conflicting information of the utmost importance. (3)
Whether you’re a startup, small business or established organization, the underlying lesson is the same:
AI is already forming and sharing an opinion about your business, whether or not you've weighed in
Auditing that footprint isn't a vanity exercise anymore
It's becoming as basic as checking your Google reviews
If you don't have the bandwidth to run this audit and fix what it turns up, that's exactly the kind of work ChitChatDigital does for clients, making sure the AI-driven version of your business is the accurate one.
Need help? #LetsChitChat
Authored by CMO Melissa E. Daley
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