Someone on your team asks a chatbot to describe your company, screenshots the answer, and drops it into Slack with no comment. You read it and something is off. The category is close enough. The customer type is wrong. There is a feature listed that you deprecated two years ago, and a competitor mentioned as though the two of you do the same thing.
That gap between what you are and what gets said about you has a name now. Entity drift. It sounds like a small problem until you notice how many buyer conversations start inside a description you did not write.
What drift looks like the first time you catch it
Rarely a dramatic error. The obvious mistakes get corrected quickly because someone notices and complains loudly.
Drift is quieter. You get described as a tool for a market segment you moved away from. Your product gets grouped with a category you deliberately positioned against. The founder’s name is attached to a different company. Your pricing model is described as the one you had before you changed it. Each of these is close enough to plausible that nobody flags it, and they compound.
You also see it in the follow up questions. Ask the engine to compare you with two competitors and the comparison uses whatever framing it settled on earlier. The wrong description does not just sit there. It becomes the basis for everything else the system says about you in that conversation.
The description you own and the description everyone else repeats
Your website is one input among many, and it is not always the loudest one.
Directory listings, review sites, old press releases, partner pages, job descriptions, conference bios, a Wikipedia entry nobody has touched in years, a Reddit thread where three people argued about what you actually do. All of that is describing you in parallel, and a fair amount of it is stale. When those descriptions disagree, the system does not pick the authoritative one. It leans toward the one that appears most consistently across places.
Which is why a rebrand executed perfectly on your own domain can leave you with an outdated identity everywhere else for a long time afterwards. You changed the source of truth. Nobody else got the memo.
Where the wrong description usually enters
Some patterns show up over and over:
- Old positioning left live on pages nobody audits, like resource hubs and legacy landing pages.
- Directory profiles claimed years ago by someone who has since left.
- A parent company or acquired brand still described as a separate entity.
- Two products with similar names, one of yours and one belonging to someone else entirely.
- Copy that describes what you aspire to be, written differently on every page it appears.
The last one is the most self inflicted. When your homepage, your documentation and your sales deck each describe the company with different vocabulary, you have made yourself genuinely ambiguous. The system is not misreading you. It is reporting the ambiguity accurately.
Rebrands, acquisitions and the long tail of old copy
Anything that changes what your company is called or what it belongs to creates drift by default, and the correction takes far longer than the announcement.
The awkward stretch is the middle period, where both descriptions are in circulation and neither has settled. You will see the old name surface in answers months after everyone internally stopped using it. That is not a failure of your communications. It is what happens when a large volume of existing text says one thing and a small volume of new text says another.
The fix is unglamorous. Update the places that get read, in rough order of how often they get read, and accept that this is a quarterly task rather than a launch week task.
Correcting a description is a repetition problem
One edit to your about page will not do it. Teams working on fixing entity drift in AI answers usually end up doing something closer to a sweep than an edit.
Write the description once, plainly. What the company is, who it serves, what problem it addresses, in language a stranger could repeat back. Then push that same wording into every surface you control: site, docs, directory profiles, social bios, help centre, press boilerplate. Same words. Resist the urge to write a fresh variation each time, because variation is exactly what created the problem.
For the surfaces you do not control, it is outreach. Ask review sites to update. Ask partners to fix the integration page. It is slow and it works.
Worth being clear eyed about the limits. Nobody outside these companies can force a correction, and a description that has been repeated widely for years will take a while to move. The same uncertainty applies to what AI systems do with your content once it has been read, which is a separate question worth understanding but not one you can solve on your side of the wire.
Checking back without turning it into a project
Set a short list of questions and run them on a schedule. Describe the company. Who is it for. What does it compete with. What does it cost. Who founded it.
Run those across a few engines once a month, paste the answers into a document, and read the previous month alongside the new one. You are looking for the phrasing that repeats and the phrasing that shifted. When a wrong detail appears twice, go and find where it lives.
It takes twenty minutes. Most teams discover the first time they do it that the description in circulation is about eighteen months behind them, and that fixing it is mostly a matter of noticing.
