Field note
Six engines, five Makefields
I asked six assistants what 'Makefield' is and got five different companies. None was the one I meant.
I asked six AI assistants a simple question (what is Makefield?) and got five different companies back. A township in Pennsylvania. A golf putter brand. A software consultancy. An insurance agency. One even reached for the archaic word make-field. Not one returned the thing I was asking about.
This is the part of AI visibility people skip past. Before an assistant can describe you well, it has to know which you it is talking about. When a name is shared, the assistant does not guess in your favour. It returns whatever it has the most evidence for, and that is rarely the newcomer.
The fix is not clever copywriting. It is becoming the clearest, best-evidenced entity for your name: a consistent description everywhere you appear, valid structured data that states plainly who you are, and enough credible third-party mentions that the assistant can tell you apart from the golf putters.
So if your company shares its name with anything (a place, a common word, another business), assume the assistant is confusing you with it, and check. The answer might not be wrong about you. It might not be about you at all.
More on this in the glossary (see "entity recognition" and "name collision"), or start with the overview.
New here? Start with the overview → · By Denes Csaszar · written in the open