What Does AI Say About Your Business?
Someone recommends you, and before contacting you, the potential client opens ChatGPT or another AI tool and asks what you specialize in, whether you're right for their business or how you compare with the other names they were given. The tool will try to answer, using the information it can find about you, which means there's now a version of your business that AI puts together, and it may not match the one you'd describe.
That's what interests me. Not just whether someone can find your business, but what AI tells them about you before they've even visited your website.
Are potential clients really using AI to research service providers?
Yes, and they're not just researching software or products. They're researching people and businesses they might hire.
According to Semrush's 2026 B2B research, which surveyed 643 US B2B professionals in March and April 2026, 66% of the 519 respondents who used AI for work said they regularly used it to research vendors and solutions. Agencies and service providers topped the list at 51%, ahead of SaaS and software at 46%.
That's businesses like ours, and while I'm not suggesting that every potential client is sitting there asking ChatGPT about you, enough people are starting to behave this way that I think we should understand what changes when they do.
Most of the conversation about AI in business has been about how we use it. Can it save us time? Write content? Research competitors? Help us do something faster?
But your potential client has access to exactly the same tools, and they're using them to research businesses like yours.
How is asking AI about a business different from Googling it?
When someone Googles your name, they usually get a collection of results. Your website, LinkedIn, podcast, social media, perhaps an interview or two. They click around, read, listen and decide what they think you do.
With AI, they can ask the tool to do some of that interpreting for them.
Imagine someone has been recommended three marketing consultants. Instead of visiting three websites and comparing services themselves, they could ask:
"I've been recommended these three marketing consultants. I run an established service business and I'm having trouble getting consistent leads. Compare them for me. Which one specializes in what I need, and what evidence supports that?"
They're not simply asking who Veronica Di Polo is. They're giving AI their particular problem and asking whether I'm suitable for it.
And that's a completely different search, because now we're not only talking about whether somebody can find you. We're talking about what they understand about you once they do.
You're no longer the only one explaining what you do.
Why might AI describe your business incorrectly?
Because AI doesn't know what's in your head. It works with the information available to it, and that information might be incomplete, outdated or inconsistent.
You might have a website promoting services you barely sell anymore, while your LinkedIn says something slightly different. Perhaps your podcast has evolved, but your bio still describes the business you had three years ago.
Then there's that interview you did ages ago, where you spent forty minutes talking about something you don't even offer anymore. Add reviews, articles, social media posts, old landing pages and all those other little pieces of your business scattered around the internet, and AI has a collection of information that doesn't necessarily tell one consistent story.
None of this is particularly strange. Businesses change, and so do we. The problem is that AI doesn't necessarily know which version of your business is the current one.
So when someone asks what you specialize in and whether you're right for them, it may be trying to answer using information that tells slightly different stories.
You can spend six months getting one beautiful sentence perfect on your homepage, but that's not necessarily the only information being used to understand you anymore.
And that's why I see this as a communication problem, not simply an AI problem.
Is AI deciding which business gets hired?
No, and I think we need to be careful not to turn this into another conversation where apparently Google is dead, websites are dead, and by next Tuesday none of us will have jobs.
The same Semrush research found that after AI mentioned a vendor:
71% visited the vendor's website.
63% searched for the company on Google.
46% compared the recommendation against alternatives.
41% returned to AI with more questions.
People were still checking. Someone might hear about you from a friend, ask AI about you, visit your website, check your LinkedIn, return to AI with another question and perhaps listen to your podcast.
We get more technology and somehow manage to end up with even more tabs open.
But here's what interests me. If someone asks AI about your business and then visits your website to check what they've been told, do those two versions make sense together?
I'm not suggesting every corner of the internet should repeat the exact same sentence about you like you've joined a cult. But someone researching your business should be able to understand what you actually do today.
And if that person came through a recommendation, I've written about what happens next in Why Referrals Don't Turn Into Clients.
How can you check what ChatGPT says about your business?
The most useful way to check is to ask ChatGPT about your business from a potential client's perspective, rather than asking what it knows about you personally.
Because who cares whether ChatGPT knows your biography? What you want to find out is whether it can explain what you specialize in, who you work with, and why someone might consider hiring you.
Here's the question I'd use for my own business:
I've been recommended Veronica Di Polo. I run an established service business and need help with my marketing and messaging. What does she specialize in? Would her work be relevant to a business like mine? What evidence can you find?
Most guides tell you to leave your name out of the prompt, because they're testing whether AI finds you at all. This is a different test: the person was already given your name, so you're checking whether AI describes you accurately once they have it.
Now adapt the question to your business, and please, don't tell it what you want it to say. Because then you're helping it, and that defeats the purpose. You want to see what it understands without you standing beside it explaining everything.
Run the question in a fresh conversation, with memory or saved personal context switched off, and web search enabled if the tool offers it. Otherwise, previous conversations may influence the answer.
Then look at what it tells you:
What did it get right, and what did it miss?
Does it describe the work you actually want to be doing today?
Is it still talking about services you stopped offering?
Does it understand who you work with?
Can it find evidence supporting your experience?
Is something important about your business missing?
And here's the slightly uncomfortable question...
Would you hire yourself based on that answer?
Remember, one answer from one AI tool isn't a reliable measurement of how your business appears everywhere. Try the same question a few times, and in different tools if you can, before drawing conclusions.
You're not trying to get AI to approve of your business. You're trying to see what someone else might discover before you've had a chance to explain yourself.
What should you do if AI gets your business wrong?
If the answer cites sources, start there and check which pages it used. Some answers won't point to anything specific, so go through your public information yourself.
If it describes a service you stopped selling, find where that service still lives, whether it's an old page, your LinkedIn or the bio on an old interview, and update it.
If it can't find evidence for what you say you're good at, the evidence might be sitting inside your client projects, proposals, presentations or conversations, and nowhere public.
This isn't about writing for ChatGPT instead of people. It's about making sure what's out there describes the business you run today.
And even when your information is accurate, AI can still make mistakes. You can't control every answer it produces, but you can make sure the information you publish is current and accurate.
Being found isn't the same as being understood
For years, we've talked about Googling ourselves. What comes up? Is the website there? Does everything look professional?
I think there's another question worth asking now: what conclusion does AI reach after it finds you?
Because someone discovering your name doesn't automatically mean they understand what you do, who you work with or why you might be the right person for them.
And if potential clients are starting to use AI to research and compare service providers, I would rather know what it's saying about my business now than find out after everyone else does.
Someone can recommend you for exactly the right reasons, and if what AI tells them describes an older or thinner version of your business, that recommendation loses some of its weight before you've said a word.
I'm Veronica Di Polo, a marketing consultant based in Moraira, Spain, and host of Branding Momentum, a marketing and messaging podcast for experienced service business owners and consultants.
If you ran the test and AI couldn't find evidence for what you're good at, my free four-day email sprint covers building that proof.
Listen to the full episode: Spotify | Apple Podcasts
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