ExplainerAI visibility
Why AI Engines Get Your Brand Wrong (Five Root Causes)
by the AEO GEO Labs team3 min read
Ask an AI engine to describe your company and you will sometimes get a sentence that is confidently wrong. Old pricing. A product you retired two years ago. A competitor's feature attributed to you.
People call this hallucination and treat it as random. In our experience it rarely is. The error usually has a traceable source, and once you find it you can usually fix it. Five causes cover almost everything we see.
1. The web still says the old thing
Models are trained on snapshots of the web, and retrieval systems pull from whatever is indexed now. If your pricing changed in March but a dozen directory listings, a partner page, and an old press release still quote the previous numbers, the engine has one source saying the new price and twelve saying the old one. Majority tends to win.
The fix is boring: find every third-party page that states a fact about you and update it. Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, LinkedIn, partner directories, and your own old blog posts. Your site is one vote among many.
2. Your own site is inconsistent
The homepage says "for enterprise teams." The pricing page starts at $9 a month. The About page says founded in 2018 and the footer says 2019. The schema markup names a product that was renamed last quarter.
A model reading all of this has no way to know which version is current. It picks one, or blends them. Before you worry about external sources, check your own pages: facts in body copy, schema, llms.txt, and title tags should all agree.
3. Your name collides with something else
If your company shares a name with a common word, a song, a town, or another business, entity confusion is nearly guaranteed. We have seen a software company described with the product line of an unrelated manufacturer, and a consultancy merged with a restaurant.
Engines resolve entities using context clues: industry, founders, location, products. If your site never states those plainly, the model has little to anchor on. Organization schema with sameAs links to your LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Wikidata entries helps. A clear first paragraph on the About page helps more.
4. The engine cannot read the right page
Sometimes the correct information is on your site and the engine never saw it. Common reasons: the page renders entirely in JavaScript, the AI crawler is blocked in robots.txt, the page sits behind a login or cookie wall, or the content lives in an image or PDF.
If the pricing table only exists after a script runs, a text-only fetch sees an empty div. The engine then falls back to whatever third party has described your pricing, which brings you back to cause number one.
5. The page says nothing quotable
Your site is crawlable and consistent, but the pages are written as marketing, not facts. "A modern platform for ambitious teams" cannot be turned into an answer. "Project management software for agencies with 10 to 100 staff, priced per seat" can.
When a model finds no clear statement, it infers, and inference is where the strange descriptions come from. The engine is guessing what you probably do from your vocabulary and your competitors' vocabulary.
How to diagnose which one you have
Collect the wrong answers first. Run the same five or six prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, and record exactly what each says. Then for each error, ask in order:
- Can I find a public page, anywhere, that says this wrong thing?
- Does my own site say it anywhere, including schema and old posts?
- Is there another entity with my name that this fact belongs to?
- Can a text-only fetch of my correct page actually read the fact?
- Does my correct page state the fact in a single plain sentence?
The first question that gets a yes is usually your cause. At AEO GEO Labs this diagnostic opens every visibility audit, because fixing the wrong cause wastes months.
What to expect after fixing it
Corrections do not propagate instantly. Retrieval-based engines like Perplexity tend to pick up changes within days or weeks once pages are recrawled. Answers that lean on training data can lag much longer. This is why we measure share of answer and accuracy weekly rather than checking once and declaring victory.
For a starting picture, AEO GEO Labs offers free checkers for crawler access, JavaScript visibility, and schema markup. Run your homepage, pricing page, and About page through all three. Most brands find one of the five causes before lunch.