Cleotic

Making sure AI assistants describe your business correctly

Updated 17 October 2026 · 10 min read

Andy Bright

Director of Product and Technology

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Being mentioned in an AI answer only helps if the answer gets your business right. An assistant that recommends you at last year's price, or says you don't offer something you do, can cost you the customer it was about to send.

When Fernhill Coffee's owner asked ChatGPT "does Fernhill Coffee deliver to Ireland?", the answer said no. Fernhill started delivering to Ireland earlier this year. This chapter explains why assistants make mistakes like that, and how to give them one consistent version of the facts.

Why assistants get businesses wrong

An AI assistant describes a business by combining what it finds about it, as the first chapter explains. When the pages it finds disagree, it has to choose between them, and it can choose the wrong one. These are the usual causes:

  • Old pages on your own site. Fernhill's delivery FAQ from 2023 still said "we only deliver within the UK", which was true when it was written, and it was still in Google's index.
  • Old pages on other sites. A review site's 2024 article about Fernhill quoted its old prices and said it delivered only within the UK.
  • Facts that disagree. If your website, your LinkedIn page and a press release give three different founding dates, the assistant has to pick one.
  • Nothing clear to go on. With no About page, no public prices and no named team, the assistant has little that comes from you.
  • A shared or similar name. The assistant may mix you up with another business, place or person.
  • Several near-identical pages. Bing says near-identical pages make it harder to tell which one answers a question. It also says AI systems "group near-duplicate URLs into a single cluster and then choose one page to represent the set" (Bing Webmaster Blog⁠(opens in a new tab)). The one they choose may be the old one.

Assistants don't always say when they're unsure. In early 2025, Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism asked eight AI search tools to find the source of 200 news articles, 1,600 questions in all. Together they got more than 60% of the answers wrong, and most of the tools were "rarely using qualifying phrases" to show any doubt (Columbia Journalism Review⁠(opens in a new tab)). That study tested news articles, not businesses, but it shows how confidently an assistant can repeat a wrong fact.

Step 1: Write the facts down once

Start with one document that everyone in the business uses as the true version of the facts. Marketing, sales, support and whoever answers press enquiries should all copy from it. Call it a fact sheet.

A fact sheet usually includes:

  • the business's name, how to write it, and any other names it uses
  • one sentence that says what the business does and who for, written the way you'd want an assistant to say it
  • the category, in the words customers use, such as "coffee subscription" rather than "beverage solutions"
  • when it was founded, where it's based, and who runs it
  • products and plans, with current prices, limits and currency
  • where it sells and delivers
  • facts that set it apart, stated as things that can be checked, such as numbers, certifications or awards
  • its official website and profiles on other sites
  • businesses or people it's often confused with, and how it differs

Fernhill's fact sheet starts like this:

Name:          Fernhill Coffee (legal name Fernhill Coffee Ltd)
In one line:   Fernhill Coffee is a small-batch coffee roaster in the UK
               that sells coffee beans and subscriptions online.
Founded:       2018
Head roaster:  Sam Okafor
Delivers to:   UK, and since 2026 Ireland and Germany
Subscription:  A 250g bag every week (£9.50), fortnight (£10.50) or
               month (£11.50), UK delivery included.
               Pause or cancel at any time.
Website:       https://www.example.com
Not to be confused with: a holiday cottage business with a
               similar name.

Then make every public description match it.

Step 2: Make your own site match

Your own website is the source you control completely, so fix it first.

  • Write an About page that says who you are, what you do, who runs the business, where you're based and how to contact you. When an assistant searches for who a business is, this is the page you want it to find.
  • Put your prices on a page crawlers can read, with the same figures as your fact sheet. The content chapter explains how.
  • Add pages for the people who write and speak for the business, with real biographies.
  • Find old pages that contradict the fact sheet, and update them, merge them into the current page, or remove them. Fernhill rewrote its delivery FAQ and redirected an old "UK delivery" page to the current delivery page. A redirect sends anyone, including crawlers, who asks for an old address to a new one. The technical SEO guide's redirects chapter explains how to retire a page properly.
  • Use your business's name and one-line description the same way in page titles (the title shown in browser tabs and search results), in the short descriptions search engines show under them, and in headings.

Structured data

Structured data is code you add to a page to describe its content in a standard format that machines can read. The Organization type describes your business: its name, logo, founding date, contact details and profiles on other sites. The technical SEO guide's structured data chapter has a full example for Fernhill.

Google says no special structured data is needed for its AI features (AI features and your website⁠(opens in a new tab)). Ahrefs compared 1,885 pages that added structured data with similar pages that didn't, and found⁠(opens in a new tab) that "adding schema produced no major uplift in citations on any platform". Schema is another name for structured data, and "any platform" means Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT. That study only looked at pages AI assistants were already citing heavily, so it says little about pages they don't cite yet. Structured data's value is that it states your facts in one unambiguous place, which helps search engines connect your website with your profiles elsewhere.

Step 3: Make the rest of the web match

AI assistants rely heavily on what other websites say about you, as the chapter on other websites explains. The facts on those sites need to match too.

  1. Claim your profiles on the sites your customers use, which means proving to each site that you own the business, and complete them. For most businesses that includes LinkedIn and the main review sites in your industry. If you serve customers in person, such as in a shop, café or office, it also includes Google Business Profile and Bing Places, Microsoft's equivalent. Fernhill sells only online, so it has no Business Profile, but it has listings on two coffee marketplaces.
  2. Copy the same one-line description, category and facts from your fact sheet into every profile.
  3. Search for your business name and read the first few pages of results. Note every page that gets a fact wrong.
  4. Ask for corrections. A short, polite email to the editor or site owner, with the correct facts and a link to the page on your site that shows them, often works. Fernhill asked the review site to update its 2024 article with its current prices and delivery countries, and the editor added a correction a week later.
  5. Keep a standard paragraph about your business for journalists, sometimes called a boilerplate, that matches the fact sheet. Journalists who use it then repeat the right facts.

Wikidata and knowledge panels

Wikidata is a free database of facts about people, places, organisations and things, run by the same foundation as Wikipedia. Its facts are free for anyone to reuse. Each entry is called an item.

Wikidata accepts more items than Wikipedia does. Its notability policy⁠(opens in a new tab) accepts an item that refers to "a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references". But it doesn't welcome items written by the business itself. Its essay on self-promotion⁠(opens in a new tab) says that "creating an item about yourself, your organisation, or your work is a form of self-promotion and is strongly discouraged". Anyone paid to edit Wikidata must also disclose who pays them, under its paid editing policy⁠(opens in a new tab).

So if your business has no Wikidata item, don't create one. If one exists and its facts are wrong or out of date, suggest the correction on the item's Discussion tab, at the top of its page. Say who you are, and link to independent sources that support it. The rules for Wikipedia, which are stricter, are in the chapter on other websites.

A knowledge panel is the box of information about a business, person or place that Google sometimes shows beside its search results. Google says knowledge panels are "automatically generated" from "various sources across the web", and that the business or person they describe can claim the panel and suggest changes (Google Knowledge Panel Help⁠(opens in a new tab)). If a panel appears when you search for your business, claim it. For a business that serves customers in person, the box beside the results is usually its Google Business Profile instead, which you edit in your Business Profile account.

If your name is shared with someone else

A shared name is hardest for newer and smaller businesses. An assistant with little information about you may fill the gaps with information about the better-known business, place or person.

There's a holiday cottage business with a similar name, and an early ChatGPT answer about Fernhill Coffee mentioned "farm stays". These steps help:

  • Use a short description with your name wherever you can, such as "Fernhill Coffee, the UK coffee roaster", rather than "Fernhill" on its own.
  • Put your category in the titles of your main pages, such as "Fernhill Coffee: coffee subscriptions and fresh beans".
  • Ask your developer to list your other names in alternateName and every official profile in sameAs in your Organization structured data, so search engines can tell that those profiles all belong to one business. The technical SEO guide's structured data chapter shows how.
  • Ask the assistants "what is Fernhill Coffee?" and "who owns Fernhill Coffee?" every month, and watch for answers that describe the other business. The measurement chapter explains how to keep track.
  • Earn more independent coverage. The more independent pages describe you clearly and consistently, the less room an assistant has to confuse you with someone else.

When an assistant gets something wrong

No assistant has a form where a business can correct an answer directly. These steps fix most errors, though not quickly.

  1. Find where the wrong fact comes from. If the answer shows sources, open them. If it doesn't, search the web for the wrong fact in quotation marks. Fernhill found the Irish delivery claim on its own old FAQ page and in the 2024 review.
  2. Fix the pages you control. Update or remove the page, and tell search engines it has changed. The technical SEO guide's sitemaps and IndexNow chapter explains how.
  3. Ask other sites to correct their pages, as in Step 3 above.
  4. Use the assistant's feedback button. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude all let people rate or report an answer. It won't fix the pages behind the answer, but it tells the company about the problem.
  5. Check again over the following weeks. Answers based on a web search change once the search engines have the updated pages, which can take days or weeks. Mistakes that come from a model's training data change only when the company releases a new model, which can take many months.

Fernhill's Irish delivery answer was right in ChatGPT and Perplexity within three weeks of fixing its FAQ and the review article.

What to do next

  1. Write your fact sheet, and share it with everyone who describes the business in public.
  2. Ask three AI assistants "what is [your business]?" and "what does [your business] cost?", and list every wrong fact.
  3. For each wrong fact, find the page it comes from, and fix it or ask for a correction.
  4. Check your About, pricing and delivery pages against the fact sheet, and update or redirect old pages that contradict it.
  5. Claim your main profiles, such as review sites, LinkedIn and, if you serve customers in person, Google Business Profile and Bing Places. Copy the fact sheet into each one.

Further reading