The Cheapest AEO Fix Nobody Does: Say One Thing About Yourself
Ask an assistant what your company does. If the answer is a hedged sentence that could describe four different businesses, the problem is not that the model is confused about whether you exist. It is confused about what to call you — because you have told it three different things.
This is the cheapest meaningful work in AEO and it gets skipped constantly, because it looks like copywriting rather than optimisation.
How the inconsistency happens
Nobody decides to describe their company four ways. It accumulates.
The homepage was rewritten last year by someone chasing a punchier headline. The pricing page kept the older, more literal description. LinkedIn was filled in at incorporation and never revisited. The Crunchbase profile was written by whoever raised the round. A review platform profile was completed in a hurry by whoever claimed it.
Each is defensible alone. Together they are five slightly different companies, and a model synthesising across them produces something that fits none of them.
Why it costs you specifically
Models build associations from repetition. A company described the same way across many sources produces a strong, confident pattern the model can reproduce. A company described five ways produces a weak one — and weak patterns lose to strong ones when a shortlist has three places.
It also affects the questions that look easiest. A brand question hands the model your name, so appearing is trivial. What is not trivial is being described correctly — and a hedged, generic answer to "what is [company]" is a failure even though your name appeared.
The fix
1. Write one sentence
Plain, specific, and useful out of context. It should name what you do and who for, without adjectives that assert nothing.
"A platform that helps teams work smarter" fails. "A tool that checks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend your brand" works, because someone could repeat it accurately after reading it once.
2. Put it everywhere, word for word
Homepage. About page. Pricing page footer. LinkedIn. Crunchbase. Every review platform profile. Press releases. Author bios. Your llms.txt if you have one.
Word for word matters. Paraphrasing reintroduces exactly the variation you are trying to remove.
3. Declare it in schema
Organization schema on the homepage, with the same name and description, plus sameAs links to the profiles you just updated. That gives a machine an explicit statement rather than an inference.
4. Add the sameAs links
Link to profiles someone verified: a company register, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikipedia if you are there. Three that can be corroborated beat twelve anyone could create.
The audit, in fifteen minutes
Open every place your company is described and paste the descriptions into one document. Homepage, About, pricing, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, review profiles, your last press release.
Read them consecutively. Most companies discover they are running four positioning statements simultaneously, and that nobody has read them side by side before.
Then ask three assistants what your company does. The hedging in their answers usually maps directly onto the variation in that document.
The part that is genuinely hard
Choosing the sentence.
The work is not updating profiles — that is an afternoon. It is getting agreement internally on one description, when marketing prefers the aspirational version, sales prefers the concrete one, and the founder prefers the one from the pitch deck.
That argument is worth having once. It is also why this stays undone at companies that have known about it for a year.
