Why AI Gets Your Brand Wrong (and What Actually Fixes It)

Introduction

Imagine you’re on a sales call and the buyer says something about your company that’s just wrong. A product you stopped selling last year. A price you’ve never charged. So you ask where they heard it. “ChatGPT told me.”

If you’ve ever wondered why AI gets your brand wrong, it’s usually not random. Most of the time, it comes down to one of two things. Either the AI doesn’t know much about your company, or it searched online and picked up the wrong page.

This happens more often than most people think. A large EBU and BBC study of news answers found that 45% of AI replies had at least one significant issue.

Your buyers can’t tell these two problems apart, but each one needs a different fix. Below, you’ll find a free test that shows you which problem you have, and the fixes that actually work.

Why AI Gets Your Brand Wrong: The Two Real Reasons

When AI gets your brand wrong, it almost always comes down to one of these two problems.

• It doesn’t know you well enough. The AI hasn’t learned much about your company, so it fills the gaps with guesses. This happens before it even goes online.
• It finds the wrong page. The AI searches the web, but it picks a page that’s out of date, written by a competitor, or about a different company with a similar name.

Below, we look at both problems more closely. You’ll see what the AI does when it barely knows your brand, why it sometimes trusts the wrong source, and why it doesn’t always search at all.

Your Brand Barely Exists in the AI’s Memory

Now, I will tell you something that surprises a lot of people. AI tools can sound completely sure of themselves, even about brands they hardly know. And there’s research to back this up. A study presented at ICML 2023 found that how well a model knows a fact depends on how often it came across that fact while it was learning. The less common the fact, the more likely the AI is to get it wrong.

So what does that mean for your marketing team? Put simply, if people don’t talk about your brand much online, the AI doesn’t have much to work with when someone asks about you.

Why Does the AI Still Answer Anyway?

You’d think the AI would just say “I don’t know” when it’s unsure. It almost never does. It fills in the blanks with whatever feels close enough, usually general facts about your industry or details it has picked up about a bigger competitor. This is exactly the problem generative engine optimization is meant to fix.

The AI Picks the Wrong Source When It Searches

When the AI does go online, things can go wrong in a different way. It pulls up a few pages and sums them up for the user. So if an old Crunchbase profile, a directory listing from 2021, or a competitor’s comparison page ranks higher than your own website, that’s the version of your brand people end up hearing about.

And the pages it cites aren’t always reliable either. A 2025 study in Nature Communications looked at AI answers to medical questions and found that 50% to 90% of them weren’t fully backed up by the sources they pointed to. Even GPT-4o, with web search turned on, left about 30% of its statements unsupported.

Sometimes the AI Doesn’t Search at All

Here’s the part most brands miss. AI tools decide on their own whether a question needs a live search. If they decide it doesn’t, they answer from memory. That means your brand question never even reaches the web, so your latest updates and new pages don’t come into play at all.

Two Ways AI Gets Your Brand Wrong: Facts vs. Positioning

Not every wrong answer looks the same. When AI gets your brand wrong, some mistakes jump right out at you. Others are so quiet you might never notice them, and those can end up costing you even more.

Below, we look at each type of mistake and walk through a simple example where they show up in the same answer.

→ Factual Errors

These are the ones people catch. The AI gets your founding year wrong, puts your headquarters in the wrong city, mentions a product you stopped selling, or quotes a pricing plan you never had.

→ Positioning Errors

These are much harder to spot. Everything the AI says about you is technically true, but it puts you in the wrong category, pitches you to the wrong kind of buyer, or calls you a cheaper option to a competitor you actually beat.

None of this is wrong enough to report. But it can still quietly knock you off a buyer’s shortlist.

An Example of Both Problems at Once

Here’s an example of how this usually plays out.

Let’s say a mid-sized compliance software company tries the test from this article. First, they ask ChatGPT about themselves with search turned off. It tells them they sell to enterprise finance teams. But they don’t. Their customers are healthcare providers.

Then they turn search on and ask again. This time, ChatGPT gets the category right. But it pulls its info from an old 2022 review listing and brings up a plan the company stopped offering 18 months ago.

So one brand, two problems. The AI didn’t know enough about the company to begin with, and when it went looking, an outdated page beat the company’s own pricing page. Each problem needs its own fix, and running the test is the only way to know which one you’re dealing with.

Why Does AI Get Your Brand Wrong in a Different Way Every Time?

Ask ChatGPT the same question twice, and you might get two different descriptions of your company. That’s not a bug. It’s just how these tools work, and it’s a big part of why AI gets your brand wrong in a different way every time.

Below, you’ll see why AI answers keep changing, why checking once isn’t enough, and how to tell a real problem from a random slip.

1. AI Answers Change From Run to Run

AI tools don’t pull up a saved file about your company. They write every answer from scratch, picking each word based on what’s most likely to come next. So the same question can come back with different wording, different sources, and sometimes even different facts. When live web search is turned on, the answers change even more, because the pages it finds keep changing every day.

2. One Check Isn’t Enough

That’s why testing once doesn’t tell you much. In a study led by SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin, about 600 volunteers ran the same 12 prompts nearly 3,000 times across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI. Fewer than 1 in 100 runs came back with the same list of brands.

3. Look for Patterns, Not One-Offs

If a wrong answer shows up once, it’s probably just noise. But if it shows up in seven out of ten tries, that’s a pattern, and there’s usually a specific page behind it. That’s why it’s worth taking the time to track brand mentions in AI search on a regular basis instead of checking just once.

What It Costs When AI Gets Your Brand Wrong

When AI gets your brand wrong, the biggest cost is lost deals. And the worst part is that you’ll never see them happen.

Below, we look at the two ways this hurts you, the deals that quietly slip away and the damage it can do to your reputation.

1. Lost Deals You Never See

A buyer asks for an AI tool which companies can help with their problem. If your brand comes up in the wrong light, or doesn’t come up at all, they just move on. They never visit your website, and they never show up in any report you track. There’s no bounce to look into and no lost visit to count. It’s the same blind spot that makes zero-click search so hard to plan for.

2. Damage to Your Reputation

It gets worse when the AI says something false about your pricing, your compliance, or your services. It says it in the same calm, confident voice people tend to believe. So buyers are forming their first opinion of you from a source you can’t edit, and you won’t even know it’s happening.

Who’s Most at Risk When AI Gets Your Brand Wrong

The brands most at risk when AI gets your brand wrong are the ones that aren’t talked about much on other websites. The risk is even higher if what you sell is complex, tightly regulated, or has changed recently. In all of these cases, the AI simply doesn’t have enough correct information to go on.

Below, we cover the industries we see hit the hardest, the legal risk when AI gets things wrong, and a few well-known real cases.

Industries We See Hit the Hardest

In Qoulomb’s audit work, the same four patterns keep showing up.

• B2B SaaS companies that recently changed direction. The web still talks about the old product, so the AI does too.
• Professional and financial services. Rules and details change often, but old directory profiles and news stories stay the same.
• Manufacturers and industrial suppliers. They often have a great reputation offline, but very little online for the AI to learn from.
• Regional and multi-market brands. If a bigger company somewhere else has the same name, the AI often mixes the two up.

This comes from what we see in our client work, not from a formal survey, and we haven’t published a sample size.

The Worst Case: Legal Liability

So far, one legal case has tested this, and the company lost. In Moffatt v. Air Canada (2024), a tribunal in British Columbia ruled that the chatbot on Air Canada’s website gave a customer the wrong information about bereavement fares. Air Canada argued that the chatbot was responsible for its own answers. The tribunal didn’t agree and ordered the airline to pay the customer $650.88 in damages, plus interest and fees.

The lesson here is a narrow one. You’re responsible for the AI tools you run on your own website. The case doesn’t say you’re responsible for what ChatGPT says about you on its own. That question is still open.

Other Well-Known Cases

Google’s AI Overviews made some widely reported mistakes after launching in the US in 2024, and Google restricted the feature soon after. Perplexity was also one of the four AI assistants tested in the EBU and BBC study we mentioned earlier. In both cases, the real problem comes down to which sources the AI decides to trust.

How to Check If AI Gets Your Brand Wrong

Before you pay anyone to fix anything, check whether AI gets your brand wrong yourself. It’s a simple test that takes about 90 minutes and doesn’t cost a thing.

The steps below show you how to report a wrong answer, how to run the free test, and how to make sense of your results.

1. Report It, But Don’t Expect a Fix

It’s worth reporting a wrong answer, but don’t sit around waiting for it to be fixed. In ChatGPT, you can give the answer a thumbs-down and leave a comment. Google AI Overviews has a feedback link under each answer. Bing and Perplexity have similar options too.

But none of them give you a ticket number, a timeline, or any proof that something was actually fixed. Your feedback helps these tools get better in general, but it won’t correct what they say about your brand. So report it, and then run the test below to find out what’s really causing the problem.

2. The Free Search-Off vs. Search-On Test

The idea is simple. You ask the same questions twice, once with web search turned off and once with it turned on, and then compare the answers. With search off, you see what the AI remembers about you. With search on, you see what it finds about you online.

1. Write five questions about your brand. For example, What does [brand] do? Who is [brand] for? Is [brand] better than [competitor]? How much does [brand] cost? Who founded [brand]?
2. Ask them with search off. Ask all five questions three times each, starting a new chat every time.
3. Ask them again with search on. Ask the same five questions three times each, and note down every source the AI links to.
4. Try other platforms too. Repeat the test on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
5. Grade every answer. Mark each one as correct, factually wrong, or wrongly positioned.

What Your Results Mean

Once you’re done, use this table to see what your results are telling you.

Your result	What it means	What to do first
Wrong with search off, right with search on	It’s a memory problem. The live web is correcting the AI for you.	Get more accurate mentions of your brand on other websites
Right with search off, wrong with search on	It’s a source problem. Another page ranks above you for your own brand name.	Fix the exact pages the AI linked to
Wrong both ways	You have both problems.	Start with the sources, because they’re quicker to fix
Right both ways, but in the wrong category	Your website doesn’t clearly say what you do and who you serve.	Rewrite your main pages, or check your AI search readiness

What to Do When AI Gets Your Brand Wrong

When AI gets your brand wrong, your test result tells you where to begin. Just work through the steps in order.

Below are the fixes for each test result, plus what to do if you’d rather have someone handle it for you.

If the Search-Off Test Failed: Fix the Memory Problem

• Start with Wikidata, then Wikipedia – Any company can create a Wikidata entry, and it gives AI tools a clear, organized record of who you are. Every detail you add needs a published source, so collect your press coverage and company filings first. Wikipedia is much harder to get into, so check whether you qualify before you put time into it.
• Get mentioned in the places AI tools look – Industry publications, relevant Reddit threads, and review sites matter far more than writing more posts on your own blog. Some good ways in are journalist request platforms, sharing expert comments, and asking happy customers to review you on G2 or Capterra. Just don’t promote yourself on Reddit. Those posts usually get taken down and can do more harm than good.
• Describe yourself the same way everywhere – Pick one category name, one way of describing who you serve, and one company summary, and use them in every press release, team bio, and partner listing. If there are three different versions of you out there, the AI won’t know which one to believe.

If the Search-On Test Failed: Fix the Source Problem

• List the pages the AI actually linked to – You noted these down in step 3. Sort them by how often they came up, and start with the top three.
• Update the profiles you control – You can edit your Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, and LinkedIn pages, along with old directory listings, today. Don’t bother asking competitors to take down their comparison pages, because they won’t. Publish your own instead.
• Make your main pages easy for AI to understand – Your H1 should say what category you’re in using plain words, not a catchy slogan. The first 100 words should explain what you do, who you serve, and what it costs. Use H2s that match the questions buyers actually ask, and add Organization and Product schema. These same basics also help you improve brand visibility in AI search overall.

Want This Done for You?

Doing this test properly takes real time. That’s five questions, three runs each, two search settings, four platforms, and a grade for every single answer. If you’d rather have someone run it for you, with more questions and tracking over time, that’s exactly what we do.

What Actually Fixes AI Brand Errors (and What’s Just Folklore)

When AI gets your brand wrong, you’ll hear plenty of advice on how to fix it. Only one approach has peer-reviewed research behind it. A few others make good sense but haven’t been proven yet. And one is pure folklore sold as a quick fix.

Approach	Evidence behind it	What to do
Adding statistics, sources, and quotes to your content	Peer-reviewed (Princeton-led study, KDD 2024)	Do this first
Consistent profiles, structured data, complete pages, aligned messaging	Experts agree, but no study yet	Do it as good practice, but don’t expect guaranteed results
llms.txt, keyword stuffing, made-up AI schema	None, or shown to hurt	Skip it

The points below walk you through what research has proven, what makes sense but isn’t proven yet, where llms.txt fits in, and which popular tips are just folklore.

What’s Actually Proven

The Princeton-led GEO study, presented at KDD 2024, tested nine different content changes across 10,000 search queries. Three findings really stand out.

• Facts, sources, and quotes work – Adding statistics, citing sources, and including quotes from trusted experts made content up to 40% more visible in AI answers.
• Keyword stuffing backfires – Stuffing in keywords actually did worse than leaving the content as it was.
• Results depend on your industry – What worked changed from one topic to another, so the results won’t be the same for every business.

There’s one thing to keep in mind. The study measured how often content gets seen and cited, not whether a specific wrong claim gets fixed. It’s the best evidence we have, but it isn’t a direct fix.

Putting the Research Into Practice

In plain terms, give the AI facts it can easily quote. Add real numbers, name where your information comes from, and include short quotes from people who know the subject well. These are the same habits that help your pages show up in ChatGPT answers.

What Makes Sense but Isn’t Proven Yet

Most experts agree on these, and so do we. But no controlled study has tested them yet, and we’d rather be upfront about that.

• Consistent profiles – Keep your details the same across LinkedIn, Crunchbase, G2, Wikidata, and industry directories.
• Structured data – Use the standard schema.org Organization and Product types.
• Complete pages – Clearly say what you do, who you serve, what it costs, and what you don’t do.
• Aligned messaging – Make sure your PR, sales materials, and website all describe you the same way.

The thinking behind these makes sense, but the proof just hasn’t been published yet. Treat them as good habits, not guaranteed results.

Does llms.txt Fix This?

No, it doesn’t. Google’s guide to generative AI features says you don’t need any special AI text files to show up in its AI results, and that llms.txt won’t help or hurt how you appear in Google Search.

You’ll still find some agencies claiming an llms.txt file can stop AI from getting your brand wrong within a day. There’s no published proof of that. If a vendor opens with that promise, take it as a red flag.

The file is free, it won’t do any harm, and it can be handy for developer documentation. Just don’t rely on it to fix how AI talks about your brand.

What Google’s John Mueller Said About llms.txt

Google’s John Mueller hasn’t held back on this one. He compared llms.txt to the old keywords meta tag and pointed out that, as far as he knew, none of the AI services had said they actually use it.

What’s Just Folklore

• llms.txt as a fix for wrong answers – We’re mentioning it again because it’s the most common version of this promise.
• Keyword stuffing for AI – The Princeton study found it made things worse, not better.
• AI-only schema – These are made-up markup types that no search engine or AI tool actually reads. Stick to schema.org.

Final Thoughts

When AI gets your brand wrong, the good news is that you can figure out why. There are only two main causes, and most of the money gets wasted when people guess which one they have. That’s why it’s worth running the free test before you pay anyone for help, and yes, that includes us.

If your search-off answers look fine but your search-on answers are wrong, you’ve got a source problem, and you can start fixing it this week. If both are wrong, it’ll take longer. Either way, you’ll be working from real evidence instead of someone’s sales pitch. Just keep in mind that one test only shows you a single moment in time. AI tools change their answers, update their models, and switch sources, so a clean result today doesn’t mean you’ll get one next quarter.

That’s where we come in at Qoulomb. We run hundreds of prompts on a regular schedule, keep track of how often each wrong answer comes back, and find the exact source behind it whenever things change. Start with the free test, and if you’d like someone to keep an eye on it for you, feel free to reach out.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why does AI get my brand wrong?

AI usually gets your brand wrong for one of two reasons. Either it learned too little about you during training, so it guesses, or it searched the web and picked an outdated or wrong page. A simple search-off versus search-on test shows which.

2. Why does ChatGPT get my company description wrong?

Either ChatGPT knows very little about your brand and fills the gaps with your industry or a competitor, or it searches and summarizes an old profile that ranks above your website. Asking the same questions with search off, then on, tells you which.

3. Does adding an llms.txt file fix AI mistakes about my brand?

No. Google’s own guide says you don’t need special AI text files to appear in its AI results, and that llms.txt won’t help or hurt your Google visibility. Any promise that it fixes wrong answers within a day has no published evidence behind it.

4. Am I legally liable if an AI chatbot gives customers wrong information?

If it’s your own chatbot on your own website, a Canadian tribunal has already said yes, in Moffatt v. Air Canada (2024). Whether you’re liable for what other AI tools say about you is still unclear. This is general information, not legal advice.

5. How do I report wrong information to ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?

In ChatGPT, give the answer a thumbs-down and add feedback. In Google AI Overviews, use the feedback link below the answer. Neither gives you a case number or confirms a fix, so report it, then work on the sources behind the wrong answer.

6. How often should I check how AI describes my brand?

Check at least once a month, and every week after changing your positioning, pricing, or products. AI answers change from run to run, so ask each question several times and look for patterns rather than trusting a single answer on a single day.