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How the answers get made

Notes on how AI assistants decide who to name, and what that means for organisations, and the individuals who represent them, who are researched before they are chosen.

  • 4 minute read

    What structured data actually does for a model

    Structured data is markup added to a page that a visitor never sees and a machine reads directly — a way of stating who or what a page is about in a form built for parsing rather than persuading. It does not make a page more convincing to a person, and by Google's own account it does not directly improve where a page ranks either. What it removes is the guesswork a machine would otherwise have to do to work out what an ordinary paragraph is actually claiming — and guesswork is exactly what an assistant, working from a page it retrieved rather than a person reading it slowly, has the least room to do.

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  • 2 minute read

    Why AI assistants ignore most professionals

    AI assistants answer questions about professionals using whatever the open web has stated clearly about them. Most independent professionals have never stated anything clearly in a machine-readable form, so the assistant reaches for whoever has — usually a directory, a competitor, or a firm large enough to have been written about. Search results work differently and are tracked separately; this piece is about the assistant-answer channel specifically.

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  • 2 minute read

    Why your competitor gets cited and you don't

    An assistant naming a competitor instead of you is not a verdict on who is better — it is a retrieval decision, made because their page, or a directory, or a review site, stated a specific claim in a form the assistant could quote, and nothing equivalent existed in your own words. Citation behaves more like a bibliography than a leaderboard: it rewards whoever put a fact on the record in extractable form, not whoever the fact is actually true of. That distinction is also what makes a citation gap fixable, in a way a ranking gap rarely is.

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  • 2 minute read

    What a search engine and an assistant disagree about, and why

    Ask a search engine and an assistant which organisation, or which person inside one, to choose for a decision that carries real stakes, and they can name different answers. A search engine returns a ranked list of pages and leaves the comparison to the reader; an assistant retrieves a handful of those same pages and commits to a single synthesised answer. The disagreement is not a fault in either system — it is what happens when two different jobs run over two different subsets of the same web, which is why both channels are tracked separately here rather than one being assumed to predict the other.

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