What the Machine Says About You
Buyers now put the question to an answer engine before they type anything into a search box. I built the tool that checks what it says, ran it on myself first, and the answer was that I am a Scottish science-fiction fan project.
I have spent twenty-eight years in industries organized around being found. It did not occur to me until this summer that the finding had quietly changed hands.
A growing share of buyers no longer start with a search box. They ask a model: a question in prose, answered in prose, with three or four sources folded invisibly into the reply. The buyer never sees the shortlist of twelve blue links, only the verdict assembled from it.
Which raises a question almost nobody at a mid-market company has checked: what does it say about you?
So I built the check. Six questions a real buyer would plausibly ask, put to Claude with live web search on, and a report of exactly what came back — how many answers named you, how many cited your own domain as a source, and which domains got cited instead.
Then I ran it on myself. Named in three of six answers. Cited in zero of six. One answer explained that my firm “appears to be a project centered on recreating and documenting the fictional” language Iain M. Banks invented for his Culture novels — which, given that I named the company after that language, is less a hallucination than a correctly-sourced misunderstanding. Another said plainly that it “wasn’t able to find any reliable, specific information” about a company of that name in the AI space.
The machine reached for none of my writing. It reached for Wikipedia and the generic AI-consulting roundups, the listicle farms, because those exist in the shape an answer engine wants.
The instinct is to treat that as a marketing problem. I think it is closer to a publishing problem, and an old one. The engine is assembling an answer from whoever explained the category most clearly in the most quotable form. That is not a new game. It is the same game every trade publication has played since the invention of the trade publication, with the reader replaced by something that reads much faster and never clicks through.
Two things follow. The first is that the writing itself is now the distribution — not a funnel toward it. The second is more uncomfortable: the check is free, takes three minutes, and I put off running it for weeks, because there is a particular reluctance to ask a machine what it thinks of you.
It is worth getting over. The report only tells you what is already being said.