Customers ask AI before they ask you
Until a few years ago, when people wanted to know something they opened a search engine. Not any more. Overseas in particular, more and more people ask generative AI directly: “What is this?” “Can this company be trusted?”
In other words, the first impression of your product or company may arrive as an AI answer before anyone ever sees your site.
So what does the AI say at that moment? Have you ever looked?
The AI’s description is not necessarily what you wrote
Generative AI builds its answers by stitching together fragments scattered across the web. Some of it is your official copy; some is an old third-party write-up, a mix-up with another company, or plain guesswork.
When we first checked how AI described our own brand, Ninja Deterrent®, there were surprises: explanations slightly off from the facts, missing context, places where we were being confused with someone else. Nobody did this with ill intent. AI can only speak from what it managed to pick up. If you haven’t delivered the correct information, it fills the gaps with imagination.
The awkward part is that if you leave that description alone, it effectively becomes “the world’s description of your company”.
We check regularly how AI talks about us
So at Saitaniya we built and run our own mechanism that regularly fetches and records how generative AI describes our brand. Call it an “AI ego-search”.
We periodically ask questions like “What is Saitaniya?” and “What kind of product is Ninja Deterrent?”, and keep the answers as a timeline. That makes it visible whether the descriptions are getting more accurate or are still off.
It feels similar to tracking search rankings, except the subject is not a rank but the content of what the AI says. In this era, leaving the latter unattended is the same as outsourcing your company introduction to strangers.
What we learned — AI can only speak from what it finds
After observing for a while, one thing became clear. The way to correct an AI’s description is not to ask the AI directly, but to put the source information it draws on in the right place, correctly, with your own hands.
It sounds obvious, but it is an important conclusion. AI answers reflect the information that exists in the world. If you publish primary information clearly and without ambiguity, the AI’s description drifts toward it. Conversely, if the essentials are missing from your site, or blurred by roundabout phrasing, AI cannot pick them up correctly.
So put “primary information” on your site, properly
What we now pay attention to on our own site is not complicated.
State facts as facts. What the company does and what the product is, in words a reader cannot misunderstand. The indirect phrasing common in Japanese is hard to grasp for AI and for overseas readers alike.
Prepare question-and-answer forms. For the questions people are likely to ask an AI—“What is this?” “Why buy from Japan?”—put the answer there first, in your own words.
Write in a form machines can read too. Back the facts up not only in visible prose but in structures search engines and AI can parse, such as structured data.
None of this is a flashy technique. But if you want to correct how AI describes you, this roundabout-looking route is, in our experience so far, the one that works best.
This too is part of what we do ourselves
This AI ego-search and the tidying of primary information are one component of the mechanism Saitaniya has assembled to sell its own brand to the world. Everything a Japanese maker needs in order to sell overseas, we have built with our own products and run every day.
“We have never actually seen how our company is described overseas.” If that is you, we can start together right there.