Old product pages, outdated company descriptions, and generic content may be speaking for your brand in AI answers.
Ready to see how AI represents your brand?
A fixed-scope, three- to four-month program that helps you get more from the content you have already invested in and reduces the risk that outdated content is hurting you in AI discovery. Scope and price are agreed before work begins.
See your Category Authority Index™ score vs top competitors, including where they are winning or falling short on topics your buyers care about, and where you can claim distinct positioning.
Each page in the agreed scope is assessed against the Category Authority Standard™, with a recommendation to retain, update, consolidate, or retire as appropriate.
A prioritized plan, an agreed set of priority pages optimized, a record of agreed retirement actions, and a strategy for what to build next.
Monthly measurement of your AI visibility and recommendations, including your rank against competitors in your target categories.
Outcomes vary across systems and over time, and no content standard guarantees inclusion or recommendation in AI answers.
The answer referenced "social intelligence" and "marketing analytics." Those were capabilities from an offering the company had acquired and discontinued years ago. They did not describe the enterprise content marketing company and software platform Skyword is today. An old description was still shaping the answer someone received.
Interested in learning more? Our CEO, Andrew Wheeler, wrote about it in his recent article, Your Content Archive May Be Undermining Your Brand in AI.
Your website matters, but it is no longer the only place buyers form an opinion of you.
of business buyers use AI during their buying process
(Forrester, 2026)
of consumers seek outside sources when AI and brand messaging conflict
(Skyword survey, 2026)
1. Content that is out of date. Pages from a retired product line or positioning your brand outgrew can sit alongside your current story and surface in answers.
2. Content that is accurate but interchangeable. A well-written page that repeats the advice of every competitor gives buyers no reason to choose you. It can pass an accuracy check and still fail Skyword’s criteria for useful, differentiated, and credible content.
A useful test: Could a buyer learn the same thing from any of your competitors?
Publishing more of the same will not fix either problem. The decisions about what to keep, what to update, and what to retire are often more critical than what to create.
Start with pages that misrepresent the business. Decide whether each should be updated, consolidated, redirected, or retired, and weigh its search and business value before anything changes. Nothing changes without your approval.
Review your priority pages against Skyword’s criteria for useful, differentiated, and credible content: proprietary data, expert lived experience, challenger logic, and structural citability. Add what is missing.
Turn the remaining gaps into a prioritized plan for new content, ranked by buyer relevance, competitive authority gap, and effort. Production of new content is scoped separately.
Then ask the AI tools to describe you and the competitors you meet most often.
Note the prompts, tools, and dates, and save the answers and cited sources. Run each prompt more than once so a single response does not decide the conclusion.
Check accuracy, brand mentions, citations, and how each company is described.
Outdated descriptions can also live in old press releases and in profiles on other publishers' sites. Updating your website improves the information available, but it does not directly retrain a model or guarantee that an earlier description disappears.
Whatever route you take, give the work a defined scope, a page count, and an end date, then assign ongoing ownership so the archive does not fall behind the business again.
Talk to us about how AI represents your brand, with the option to scope a Category Authority Reset around what a benchmark against your closest competitors would reveal.
