You may want to ask AI what it thinks of your company, even if you're a single-shingle operator. You might be very surprised.

We're about to undertake the biggest search transformation ever. I've written about it on Substack, and I've written to friends and clients to buckle up because things are going to get weird for a while. How weird?

When you search for an individual or company via AI, or if you want to know where you rank, you may be surprised if you don't show up or miraculously appear in the number one spot. It may tell you that you're the best there is when you're not, or miss you entirely when you lead a category. Some call it "hallucinations," but I'm still calling them mistakes. This isn't to suggest it won't get better. It will, and it improves almost daily.

This is much like the '80s when so much crappy software came out as everyone was fighting for the lead, and nobody had a clue what productivity software should look like or how it should work. There were endless software programs that were far more trouble than going without. It took a while for true productivity to settle in, and the same is occurring with AI.

The big difference is that most of what's happening in the background with AI is invisible and complicated. For example, let's say you want the ten top pizza places in your town. How do you know you were given the top ten? It could ignore ratings entirely, and as it stands today, it does!

Right now, what matters most is how the pizza website is configured. Maybe they don't even have a website, so it's not ranked at all. Yet, based on what's said, it may or may not still show up. This is like dating the crazy girlfriend who says shit about you all the time, and you have to go around and correct what she said. Sometimes it's glowing; then other times, she brings up that you fart a lot.

This is happening right now in your searches, but on a much more complicated scale because the search parameters are not fully defined or shared with you. Don't believe me? Ask an AI for an opinion about your own website. Ask it to tell you something about you. Gemini brought up my work as a Trustee, including one of the congressional records where I was mentioned in 2003! It had no relevance to anything else, but there it was. It was stuff I had long forgotten about.

What is promising is that AI generally gets you where you want to go, and it does a much better job than a mere Google search. It still has a lot of search conflicts to resolve. What it can't do very well is cross-reference data for accuracy. It still has to take your word for some things. In the meantime, test it and see how you and your company look.

Remember, tell a lie long enough and it becomes the truth, so don’t just sit passively. Challenge the search results if they are wrong.