Ask ChatGPT About Your Company. Imagine that's Your New Homepage.

Open a new tab. Ask ChatGPT what your company does.

Not a trick question. Not a stress test. Just the question a prospect might actually type in before a first call with your sales team. Read the answer back slowly, the way you'd read a review of your own restaurant. Might be a bit uncomfortable, but do it anyway.

There's a decent chance it's wrong. Not maliciously wrong, but out of date wrong. It names a product you sunk two years ago. It describes you as a scrappy startup three funding rounds too late. It lists a competitor as a peer you quietly outgrew.

Here's the thing worth sitting with: the AI didn't make that up. It's not hallucinating a personality for you. It's summarizing what's already out there — a press release from 2021, a G2 review nobody ever responded to, a competitor's blog post that happened to rank for your category. The model is a mirror. If the reflection is unflattering, the problem isn't the mirror.

This is a perception problem wearing an SEO costume

For years, the fix for "we don't show up right" was structural: better schema markup, fresher content, the right keywords in the right header tags. That work still matters. But it quietly assumed a human was doing the reading, someone who'd click through, scroll past the stale paragraph, and form their own opinion on your actual homepage.

AI answers skip that step. Nobody's clicking through to correct the record in their head. The summary is the homepage now, for a growing number of the people forming a first impression of you. And summaries don't update themselves just because your company moved on.

That's the quieter version of a problem I keep coming back to: perception lags reality. Your positioning evolves every quarter. Your market-facing story gets rewritten every time you ship something that matters. But the internet's record of you, the pages these tools are actually reading — is mostly frozen at whatever moment someone last wrote about you and nobody followed up.

Try it yourself: the three-tool mirror test

This takes about ten minutes and nothing but a browser.

1. Ask three AI tools the same plain question. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini , Copilot or Perplexity. Just pick three. Ask each: "What does [your company] do, and who is it for?" Don't lead them. Don't paste your own positioning first. You want the unprompted answer.

2. Lay the three answers side by side. Where do they agree? That agreement is your actual market perception, whether you like it or not. Where do they wildly disagree? One calls you an agency, one calls you a platform…that's a signal nobody's told a consistent story loud enough to drown out the noise.

3. Compare all three to the positioning you'd actually use in a pitch. Not your tagline. The real sentence you'd say out loud to a prospect. Where's the gap? Old product names, a market category you've since moved beyond, a competitor mentioned that you don't think about anymore. Each one is a specific, fixable thing, not a vague "our SEO needs work…And that will help define your AEO.

The test isn't about gaming these tools into saying nicer things about you. That is not the point. You can't prompt-engineer your way out of a stale web presence, and trying tends to produce exactly the kind of generic, keyword-stuffed content these models are getting better at discounting anyway. The fix is upstream: the case studies, the about page, the executive bios, the third-party coverage — the actual source material these tools are drawing from. Fix what's true out there, and the summary catches up.

The question underneath the question

Most marketing leaders can recite their homepage bounce rate from memory. Far fewer have ask an AI tool what it thinks their company does, let alone checked three of them against each other.

That's not a knock. It's a new kind of audit, and new audits take a minute to become habit. But it's worth doing before a board member, a prospect, or a candidate does it for you and draws their own conclusions from whatever they find.

So: when's the last time you actually asked?

One pro-tip – it takes a minute for the internet to catch up. So once you make the fixes, it take moment for that to come through.