Have you asked ChatGPT about yourself yet? If not, you should. Millions of people are using ChatGPT to research businesses, evaluate professionals, and make purchasing decisions. What it says about you, or whether it says anything at all, is shaping perceptions right now.
Open ChatGPT and type your name or your business name. Ask it to describe you. Ask it what you are known for. Ask it to compare you to your competitors. The answers may surprise you, and understanding why ChatGPT responds the way it does is the first step toward influencing those responses.
Where ChatGPT Gets Its Information
ChatGPT is trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet, including websites, news articles, books, forums, and social media. It has a knowledge cutoff date, which means it does not know about things that happened after its training data was collected. It synthesizes what it has learned into conversational responses, but it does not search the web in real time (unless using specific browsing features).
This is fundamentally different from how Perplexity works, which searches the web live for every query. With ChatGPT, the information is baked into the model. If positive, authoritative content about you existed on the web when the training data was collected, ChatGPT likely knows about it. If it did not, ChatGPT may have limited or inaccurate information, or it may not know about you at all.
Why ChatGPT Might Get Things Wrong
ChatGPT can confidently present information that is incomplete, outdated, or outright incorrect. This is not a bug. It is a characteristic of how large language models work. They generate the most statistically likely response based on patterns in their training data, which means they can produce plausible-sounding statements that are factually wrong.
For businesses, this can be a real problem. ChatGPT might associate you with the wrong industry, attribute achievements to someone else, or miss your most important differentiators entirely. It might surface negative information that has since been resolved or present outdated details about your services.
What You Can Do About It
You cannot directly edit what ChatGPT says. But you can influence it by shaping the information landscape that future training data will draw from. This is where AI optimization intersects with traditional reputation management and SEO.
Start by building a strong, authoritative web presence. Your website should clearly describe who you are, what you do, and what you are known for. Use specific, factual language rather than vague marketing copy. The more clear, consistent information that exists about you across reputable sources, the more likely AI models are to get it right.
Third-party coverage is critical. Press articles, industry publications, Wikipedia mentions, and authoritative directory listings all contribute to the dataset that AI models train on. One mention in a respected outlet carries more weight than dozens of self-published blog posts.
I wrote about this concept in detail on HackerNoon: if your products are not AI searchable, you are already losing. The businesses that invest in building citable, authoritative content now are the ones that AI systems will represent accurately in the future.
ChatGPT vs. Other AI Models
ChatGPT is not the only AI system people are using to research businesses. Claude, built by Anthropic, handles reputation queries differently, with more caution and more explicit statements about uncertainty. Perplexity searches the web live and cites its sources directly. Google AI Overviews pull from Google's own index.
Each platform has its own tendencies, and what one says about you may differ from what another says. A comprehensive AI visibility strategy accounts for all of them, not just the most popular one.
Monitoring Your AI Presence
Make it a habit to periodically check what AI systems say about you. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity about your business. Note what they get right, what they get wrong, and what they leave out. This gives you a roadmap for where to invest your content and PR efforts.
Pay attention to how AI systems answer comparison queries too. "Who are the best [your industry] in [your city]?" is a query that more and more people are asking AI rather than Google. If your competitors appear in those answers and you do not, that is a visibility gap you need to close.
Take Control of Your AI Narrative
The businesses and professionals who proactively manage their AI presence will have a significant advantage over those who discover too late that AI is saying the wrong things about them. This is still early. The playing field is not yet crowded. But it will be.
If you want to understand what AI systems are saying about you and take concrete steps to shape that narrative, our AI search optimization services are built for exactly this. We audit your AI presence across all major platforms and build a strategy to improve it. Book a consultation below to get started.
Related Resources
- What does Claude say about you? — Check your presence in another major AI model
- How to appear in AI search results — Strategies for all AI platforms
- Google AI Overviews guide — Optimize for Google's AI search
- AI search optimization services — We manage your AI presence