AI Is Already Describing Your Business — Did You Write That Description?

A buyer who used to search "branding studio near me" and open six tabs now often asks a chat assistant for a shortlist and gets one. It names a few businesses, says what each is good at, and sometimes says who each is not for. Nobody at those businesses wrote that paragraph. A model assembled it from whatever it could find, and for many buyers it is now the first description of your business they read.

The answer is positioning, written by someone else

Positioning used to be the thing a business did to a customer's mind, over years, through ads and reputation. Now a version of it is generated on demand, every time someone asks. Commentators on the shift have started saying it plainly: what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews say about a category is positioning at scale. If the description is accurate and specific, you benefit from it without lifting a finger. If it's vague or wrong, you are being sold by a stranger with a worse brief than yours.

Where the wrong description comes from

Models don't invent a business from nothing. They match it to patterns. If your site says "innovative, end-to-end, customer-centric solutions," the most honest thing a model can do with that is file you under the largest category it fits, next to a thousand near-identical neighbours. Trade writing on the subject keeps making the same point: generic language gets misfiled, and a misfiled business loses the buyer before the first conversation.

The cause is usually older than AI. It's the unmade decision we described in positioning is what you refuse: without an edge, there's nothing specific for a person or a machine to repeat. AI just removed the place to hide, because the average description now gets read out loud, next to your competitors, in the same breath.

Write the sentence before it gets written for you

The fix is less glamorous than the problem. Write one plain sentence that says what you are, who you serve and what you do differently. Not a tagline, not a manifesto. Something a stranger could repeat correctly after hearing it once. Then check it against three questions:

• Does it name a category a buyer would actually search for, not one we invented?
• Does it name a customer, so it can say who you're not for?
• Does it contain one claim a competitor couldn't copy-paste?

If it fails the third, the problem isn't wording. It's that the position isn't defined yet.

Then say it the same way everywhere

A sentence only works once it's repeated. Use the same words on the homepage, the About page, your profiles and your structured data, because a model is less likely to cite a source that contradicts itself. And since being cited is partly a technical question, the sentence has to be somewhere a crawler can read it, in plain text near the top of the page, not inside an image or an animation.

Then do the cheap test again: ask the assistants about yourself. The goal isn't to game them. It's that the description they hand a buyer should sound like something you'd have said.

This is a Define post — the first of our four stages: Define, Express, Build, Grow. If an AI assistant describes you in words you'd never choose, /branding is where that gets defined first.