When someone asks AI about your company, what do they learn?
Does it describe your business accurately? Does it cite your website, or rely on someone else’s account of what you do? And when someone asks for a recommendation without mentioning your name, does your company come up?
These questions are closely related. Each tells us something different about how AI represents your business.
I am Cornelius Alfonso, founder of SEOWEBI. My work focuses on AI Brand Intelligence: measuring how AI systems represent, cite and recommend companies compared with their competitors. I then interpret what those findings mean for the people responsible for those businesses.
This newsletter is for marketing and business leaders who want to understand that picture and make informed decisions. I want to make the findings easy to follow, with enough context for you to judge what they mean for your business.
A useful place to start is with two questions:
“What does this company do?”
“Which company should I consider for this particular need?”
The first asks AI to describe a company you have already named. The second asks it to help choose a provider. AI could describe your business accurately in the first answer and leave it out of the second.
Take a hypothetical accounting firm. AI might correctly describe its services, location and customers. That gives us useful information about how the firm is represented.
But does the firm appear when someone asks for an accountant with experience supporting a particular type of business? That requires a separate test.
This distinction matters because the questions we ask determine what we can learn. If we only ask about a company by name, we have not examined whether it appears when someone is choosing a provider.
We need to look just as carefully at citations. A link to your website shows that it was cited in that answer. It does not automatically mean your company was recommended. The same applies when a competitor appears: was it recommended, compared with another business, or simply mentioned?
At SEOWEBI, the AI Brand Intelligence Report™ establishes a baseline. It examines how a company is represented, where it is recommended or overlooked against named competitors, and what the evidence supports as a next priority. Subsequent monitoring looks at what changes against that baseline.
The purpose is practical: to help leaders decide what deserves attention and what needs further investigation.
Here, I will share measured observations, competitor comparisons and the questions behind the findings. I will examine what AI answers say, which sources they cite, and how those answers relate to the buying situation being tested.
I will also explore what this means for brand and commercial decisions. A factual error, an unclear description and an absence from a recommendation each raise different questions. Understanding which situation we are dealing with helps us decide what to investigate before making changes.
You should be able to assess the evidence for yourself. When I share findings, I will explain what was asked, which AI system answered, when it was tested and whether the test was repeated. I will make clear what I observed, how I interpret it and what remains uncertain.
A single response gives us an observation. It is not enough to support a general conclusion. An AI recommendation is not an independent assessment of a company’s quality. And a change in an answer does not, by itself, prove that a particular action caused it.
My aim is to help you ask better questions about how AI represents your business, understand the answers and decide what is worth investigating next.
What would you most like to understand about how AI represents your company?
Let me know in the comments. Subscribe to receive future articles on AI Brand Intelligence.