When an Assistant Describes Your Company Wrong

Ask an assistant to describe your company. Do it now, before you read the rest of this.

Most people find two things. Something that was true three years ago and is not anymore. And something nobody at the company ever said, assembled out of context from a page that was never about you.

There is no form to fill in. That is the first thing to accept, and it is the thing that makes people panic.

Where the wrong version comes from

Usually not from lies. From gaps.

If your own site does not say plainly what you do, something else will fill the space. An old directory listing. A conference bio from 2019. A press release describing a product you retired. A LinkedIn headline you have not looked at since you wrote it.

I found this on myself. For a while assistants described me by a job title I had left, because that title appeared on more pages than the current one did. Nobody was wrong. The record was just older than I was.

What actually corrects it

Volume and consistency, on the sources that get read.

Say the true thing on your own site, in plain sentences, on a page that is about that thing. Not in a hero image. Not implied by a portfolio. A sentence a piece of software could quote without interpreting.

Then say the same thing everywhere else you control. Your profiles. Your bios. Your product pages. The wording does not need to be identical, the claim does. Inconsistency is what produces a vague answer, and a vague answer is worse than a wrong one because you cannot even see what to fix.

Then remove or update what is stale. This is the boring part and the most effective. An old page you forgot about is doing more damage than the absence of a new one.

How long it takes

Longer than you want and less time than a rebrand. In my case the description changed over a couple of months, and it changed unevenly. One assistant picked up the new version well before another did.

I would not build a campaign around this. I would treat it as maintenance, the same way you would notice your contact details being wrong on an old page and fix it without ceremony.

What does not work

Stuffing keywords. It reads as noise and it makes your page worse for the humans who do arrive.

Writing a page addressed to the assistant. I have seen sites with a block of text that only makes sense as an instruction to software. It looks exactly as strange as it sounds, and the thing you are trying to influence is not fooled by it.

Arguing publicly. Posting that an assistant got you wrong creates another page saying the wrong thing next to your name.

The part worth taking seriously

If the description is actively harmful rather than simply stale, treat it as a real problem and not a curiosity. Wrong pricing, a confusion with a company you are not, a claim about your work that would embarrass a client. Those are worth a focused week.

Everything else is worth an afternoon and a calendar reminder to check again in three months. The impulse to fix this immediately and completely is the wrong instinct, because the mechanism is slow and your effort is better spent making the true version easy to find.

Common questions

Can I contact the AI company to fix it?
There are reporting routes and they are worth using for genuinely harmful output. For "this is out of date", changing the source material is faster and more reliable.

Does a press release help?
Only if it gets picked up somewhere that gets read. A release sitting on a wire nobody indexes changes nothing.

What if there is almost nothing about us?
Then you are in the easiest position, not the worst. An empty record is much simpler to write than a wrong one is to correct.

How do I check without doing it manually every week?
Ask the same three questions in the same words every quarter and keep the answers in a document. You are looking for drift, and drift is only visible against a record.