What information does AI need to understand a company?

A useful way to approach this: imagine a competent stranger has been asked to recommend a business in your field, has thirty seconds, and can only use what is publicly available about you. What would they need to find before they were willing to put your name in an answer?

That list is short, specific, and mostly not marketing.

The official name, used consistently

One name, spelled the same way everywhere. If you trade under a name different from your registered one, state the relationship explicitly rather than letting two identities float around unconnected.

Inconsistent naming is the single most common cause of split evidence. A system that cannot confirm two records describe the same business treats them as two weaker businesses.

What you actually do

Concrete services, named individually, in the words a customer would use. Not “solutions,” not “services tailored to your needs.”

Include boundaries. What you do not do is genuinely useful information: it keeps you out of answers you would lose anyway and makes the answers you do appear in more accurate. A business that appears to do everything reads as a business that specialises in nothing.

Who you serve

Residential or commercial. Individuals or organisations. Small businesses or enterprises. Any constraint that determines whether a given customer is a fit.

Audience is the difference between being relevant to a question and merely being adjacent to it. Two firms offering identical services to different audiences are answers to different questions.

Where you operate

A physical address where one exists, plus the actual service area: named towns, districts, regions, or a radius. If you work remotely, say that explicitly, because it changes which questions you belong to entirely.

Multiple locations need to be individually identifiable. A single page listing five branches gives a system no way to answer a question about one of them.

How to make contact

Phone number, email, and a contact route, present as text on the page rather than inside an image or a script-loaded widget. Identical everywhere they appear.

A recommendation that cannot be acted on is not much of a recommendation, and contact details are among the details most likely to be quietly outdated somewhere you have forgotten about.

How pricing works, where you can say

You do not need a price list. What helps is the shape of pricing: a range, a starting point, what drives cost up or down, whether you quote after a visit.

“What does this usually cost” is one of the most common questions asked before choosing anyone. A business that says nothing on the subject cannot be part of that answer. If you genuinely cannot publish figures, explain the basis instead.

Qualifications, and their limits

Licences, registrations, certifications, insurance, and professional memberships — named specifically, with numbers where they are public. “Fully certified” is unverifiable; a named registration is checkable against a register.

Limits belong here too. Regulated professions often cannot claim outcomes, and stating what you are permitted to do is more credible than implying no boundaries exist.

What actually distinguishes you

Differentiators must be factual to be usable. “Family-run since 1994,” “the only workshop in the county certified for this equipment,” “we handle listed buildings” — these can appear in an answer. “Passionate about quality” cannot, because it is true of everyone and checkable by no one.

Evidence someone else can confirm

Genuine reviews, public register entries, professional body listings, real coverage, verifiable project detail. The purpose is corroboration: claims supported outside your own website are far safer for any system to repeat.

Make real evidence findable. Do not manufacture it — fabricated reviews and invented credentials are detectable and frequently unlawful.

Structured data, last

Marking up your business details in a structured format helps a machine parse what it has already retrieved. It is worth doing, and it is worth doing last.

Structured data must reflect what is visible on the page. Marking up information that is wrong, absent, or contradicted elsewhere does not help — it states the contradiction more precisely. It is a formatting improvement on correct information, never a substitute for having correct information.

Write this list for your business and mark each item as published-and-consistent, published-but-inconsistent, or missing. For why disagreement costs you, see why AI recommends competitors instead of you. For local businesses, see how a local business becomes visible in AI search. Our services build this list as a verified profile rather than leaving it scattered.