Tidy up your online presence for the eyes of AI

Dani says: “My tip is a really easy one: Clean up your online presence because AI sees everything.”

How do you find the elements that AI sees but you don't want it to see?

“By testing a lot. I'm doing a lot of AI research and asking AI about my company a hundred times to find out where it actually gets its information from.

You will find things that you didn't know still existed, which you should look into.”

Should you try this with lots of different AIs?

“Yes, and many times as well.

You can also do a backlink audit and see where the backlinks are coming from, and then you might find things that you don't want to be out there.

However, with AI, you can look at mentions and find out where it is looking. For my website, I was doing some tests where I was asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and every tool the same questions about me, my offering, and my prices – and it's really fascinating.

In this case, it got most of the information from my website, obviously, but I have my website in three languages. I found that there is some information on the English websites that I don't have on the German websites, which I corrected and changed. It allowed me to search for where it got that information that’s no longer true. As it turns out, it was on the Spanish version of the website.

It might be on your website, but it might be on other websites where you have a bio, for example. You might realise that a bio describes something that you’re not doing at the moment or names a company you don’t work for anymore, so maybe you should ask them to change it.”

Are ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude the three main ones to focus on?

“To be honest, Claude in Europe is not so relevant. I would focus on ChatGPT at the moment because it's the most used.

Then have a look at AI Mode or Gemini, as it shows what Google sees – and Perplexity, because it's also a search engine and not just an LLM (like ChatGPT), and it has its own search engine. It's really searching, so you get different input there as well.”

What questions do you ask to bring up the content that you're looking for?

“Anything that comes to your mind to ask about your company or your client's company. The standard things are what a user would ask: What is it about? Who is working there? How big is it? What's the offering? What are the prices? How do they work?

It’s really interesting when you find things that are written on the website but aren’t accurate anymore. It might be your processes, where it says that you always do a kick-off meeting, then a call, then X, Y, and Z. However, when you look at it from a company perspective, you don't do that anymore. Where is this process written down?”

Is this completely an SEO’s job, or should a brand team and reputation management team be involved in this?

“I think almost everyone who has a specific task in the company should be involved.

An SEO would look at what's linked from other websites. What do other websites say about the companies? That's where our work is.

From the perspective of the offering and the processes, that might be the work of the sales team to see what is written on the website about the process. Is that how we do it, or is it not?

The offering could be a special department. If it’s a bigger company, the marketing team may not know exactly how every offering is done or what it's about. They just have the overall picture. Maybe it's the person working in a department that's doing the stuff who needs to look at how we are actually appearing in AI.”

How do you get rid of the inaccurate content that it is consuming?

“If it's on your own website, it should be easy.

It’s not always that easy, depending on your website, because you may need to ask a web designer or some other person to do it if you don't have access.

If it's on a different website, it's like the typical backlink trick where you search for the places where you get mentioned and don't have a link and ask them, ‘You mentioned me, could you link to my website?’ In this case, you are asking, ‘Please can you change your website?’

The first step is finding out where you actually get mentioned. Then, try to contact them. If you wrote a guest article and the bio is not accurate anymore, you can contact that person and say, ‘Hey, I found an error in the bio. Could you change it?’

Then there are things that are obviously a little bit harder. For example, reviews on review pages, which I have seen for a lot of clients. AI is using a lot of these review pages, places like Reddit, or information where a user gave an opinion. If a bad opinion is posted there, it's not easy to ask that person, ‘I know you hate my company, but would you delete your comment?’

In that case, you need to produce better content, or more content. You could ask your best clients for reviews, or ask a client for another review. That is often forgotten about, particularly in small and medium-sized companies.

If you don’t ask your clients to review your company, the only people who will leave reviews are the ones who were not happy. It really helps to just ask, ‘We worked together. I think you were happy. Could you leave me a review?’ Then, you get more good content and less bad content out there.”

How do you determine the best places for these reviews to be published?

“That depends a lot on the niche you're in. The typical place is your Google Business Profile. If you have one, and if local SEO is important to you, it should be on there.

Then there are a lot of review pages. For software, you have Capterra and other websites where they compare software, and you can leave comments. Trustpilot is typical for online shops in German-speaking countries. If you have your company there and it's the main place where your niche is looking for recommendations, you should have it on there.

You should know your industry, so you should know which review sites are most relevant to your particular industry.”

Are there many different places where you need to look for this kind of content?

“AI can find content in different areas that you don’t even consider, like subdomains you forgot existed on your website, other platforms, and even old job listings. Job listings are good because people always forget that they put those out there.

Also, your LinkedIn profile. If you have a personal brand and you wrote something years ago, have you changed your opinion on it? If so, you can delete it, or you could make an updated post about it and say how your opinion has changed.”

Outside of AI, what steps can you take on Google to try and determine whether or not content exists that you don't want out there?

“Here, backlink analysis is really valuable. It’s something we've been doing for a long time now: looking at where we get backlinks and looking into where these backlinks are coming from.

If you have been doing SEO for 10-15 years already, chances are you have built some links where you wrote a guest post that was just about the link. You thought that nobody would read the guest post in the end, and suddenly, maybe somebody is reading it. A backlink audit to find things that are out there on the internet is a really great option.

Also, Google your own brand. Don’t just look at the first page; look at the second, third, seventh, and tenth pages. Maybe you find something just by clicking through. Look at what your brand is doing out there and how Google understands your brand. That's really interesting.

For example, I have a client that's an e-commerce website. They have the company, which is registered, and three brands, which are three online shops with different products. Google doesn't understand the connection between the online shop and the main company.

You can see that in the Shopping tab, when they use the brand or the company name. You can ask, ‘Give me more information about them. Where did you get this information from?’ Then, you find out that it gets information from the competition. Google does not understand how these three websites and the company come together.

So, maybe we should clean up the company website, the connection between the websites, and the LinkedIn profile where we say what the company is, what brands we have, and everything else.”

What would you say to a stakeholder who says that AI brings in very little traffic right now, so it's not worth spending time on it?

“Well, we're not spending time on optimizing for AI in this case. We are doing reputation management.

For stakeholders, you can tell them that you’re doing reputation management because there's information about your company that you don’t want out there, and someone might find it. So, we should act now before everyone knows about it.

If you talk about reputation management, stakeholders are normally very on board with it.”

How do you measure the financial value of reputation management?

“That's a good question and a difficult one. Measuring the value here is really hard because it's an emotional value.

The question is: If that's what's out there, what would it mean for you and the company if it were on the news tomorrow, because some journalists found it? That's an emotional thing. You can't connect it with numbers as much, but it's really important.

You could even ask your stakeholders, if this comes to the newspaper in town and they publish it, what would it mean for your business? Maybe customers who were not sure about buying from us will go to the competition. Then you might be able to put a number to it. They might know best what the impact would be.

Like we said at the beginning, we might need other departments. We might need the department handling the offering to know that whatever is written on the website is correct. If we need their input, we might also be able to access some of their budget or time from the people working in the department.”

Dani, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Look at what's said out there about your company and your client's company.

Don’t just generate new content, also clean up what's already out there.”

Dani Leitner is an Independent SEO Consultant. Find out more over at DaniLeitner.ch.