On 27 October we removed one word, boutique, from the structured data on our own homepage, because a search engine's summary of us had been repeating it from a directory profile. By 2 November the summary had dropped the word. This morning, 6 November, it was back, and this time the engine said where it got it: a G2 profile we had not touched. Our site did not appear for its own name for the fifth run running. This is the Friday post on AI search, and it is a practical one: how to find out which pages an engine reads about you, what words it takes from each, and how to make them yours in one week.
A word on the words. Search engine optimisation, SEO for short, is showing up on Google without paying per click. AI search optimisation, AIO on this site, is being the business ChatGPT, Gemini or an AI search tool names when someone asks a question. When the question is your own name, the tool reads the pages a search engine returns for it and writes a paragraph. For a small business those pages are directory profiles, and the paragraph is assembled from them.
What the engine said about us this morning, and where each phrase came from
Hyderabad, founded 2018, under 49 employees, a minimum budget and an hourly rate: from DesignRush. A legal entity name, three working languages and a time zone: from Clutch. No client reviews: from Clutch and G2 together. A boutique digital marketing agency: from G2's description field. A tagline we wrote years ago and a list of past clients: from DesignRush. And a warning not to confuse us with three similarly named companies, which was fair, because they filled four of the other results. The engine did not quote our homepage, our about page or any of 137 blog posts once, because none of them was in the ten results it read.
Five runs tell the sequence. On 24 October the summary called us boutique and the word was in our own schema and on DesignRush. On 27 October we removed it from the schema. On 30 October the summary still said it. On 2 November, six days after the fix, the word was gone and the registry entry had entered the results with the 2018 incorporation date. Today the registry entry has left, the Clutch profile has moved to second, and boutique is back from a third source. The word did not live in one place. It lived in every profile we filled in when it was true, and each one is a page the engine can read on a different day.
The original number. On the brand query Vridhii Digital run on 6 November 2026, 10 results were read: DesignRush profile, Clutch profile, G2 discussion page, a similarly named agency on SyncGTM, G2 seller page, a freelancer profile, a Slideshare deck, and three companies named Vridhi (an AI firm in Lucknow, a software firm, a housing finance company). Vridhii owned pages: 0 of 10, the fifth consecutive run at 0 after 3 on 9 October and 4 on 16 October. The engine's summary attributed the word boutique to G2's description. Across the 7 fixed non brand queries run the same morning, 70 first page results were counted: 40 directory, review platform or registry pages (Clutch 16, Semrush Agency Partners 8, DesignRush 6, G2 2, and 8 others), 2 Hyderabad agency owned pages, 0 Vridhii pages. Logged as data ledger entry 78, from the weekly tracker run, which anyone may read.
The five step fix
One. Run your name and read the summary, not the links. Any AI search tool, or a web search tool that summarises, on a fixed day each week. Copy the paragraph it writes about you into a document. Ten minutes.
Two. Trace every phrase to its source. Each adjective, each number, each name in that paragraph came from a page. Most tools say which; where they do not, the ten links underneath are the candidates. You will end with a short table: the phrase, the page it came from, whether you wrote that page. For us this morning, eleven phrases, four sources, none of them ours.
Three. Write one description and make it the only one. About forty words, present tense, what you are and for whom, the words you would use in the first minute of a call. Put it in your Organization schema. Then open every profile the engine cited and paste it over whatever is there: the description field, the tagline, the about section. Where a profile asks for a founding year, a head count or a rate, give the same answer everywhere or leave it blank. A different year on two profiles becomes two founding years in the paragraph, as it did for us on 9 October and again on 2 November. A profile you cannot edit, a registry, a scraped deck, is a page you cannot change; the others will outweigh it once they agree.
Four. Remove what you would not say in the first minute. Old taglines. Client lists you did not decide to publish in that form. Adjectives from a positioning you have left. We are doing this on three profiles this week, DesignRush, G2 and Clutch, because those three wrote this morning's paragraph. The Semrush Agency Partners listing, which holds eight of ten results on our AI search query, is a profile we do not yet have and should.
Five. Point the schema at the profiles and re run every Friday. The sameAs field lists the profiles that carry your name, so the engine joins them to the site rather than to the three similarly named companies. Then run step one again each week and watch each phrase in the paragraph move from a page you did not write to one you did. Six days was enough for a schema change to reach the summary. One run was enough for an unedited profile to undo it.
What this means if you run a business in Hyderabad
A clinic that filled in Practo in 2019, a school that filled in Edustoke in 2021, a manufacturer whose IndiaMART page was written by a salesman in 2017, each has a paragraph waiting to be assembled from those pages the moment a patient, a parent or a buyer asks a tool about them. Our count of 298 results this week found that for most trades in this city the profiles are the only pages there are. The paragraph will be written from them either way. The AI search page describes how we run the trace and the edits for a business that would rather not, and the Marketing Operating System is the weekly rhythm that caught the word coming back on the one Friday it did.
Frequently asked questions
Why does an AI engine describe my business with a word I no longer use?
Because it reads whatever pages the search engine returns for your name, and for a small business those are usually directory profiles, not your site. On 6 November 2026 our brand query returned ten results, none of them ours, and the engine's summary called us a boutique agency, quoting a G2 profile. We had removed the word from our own schema on 27 October and the summary had dropped it by 2 November. The word came back from a profile we had not edited. Every adjective on every profile is a sentence the engine may say about you.
Which profiles matter most?
The ones the engine cites. Run your business name through a web search tool and read the summary, not the links, noting which source each phrase is attributed to. For us across five runs since 24 October it has been DesignRush first, then G2, then Clutch, with a company registry entry entering once. Those three profiles, and the registry, describe us to anyone who asks a tool about us. Edit those first; the fifteen others can wait.
Should the profile text be identical everywhere?
Yes, for the sentence that describes what you are. Write one description of about forty words, the one your Organization schema carries, and paste it into every profile that allows it. Where a profile asks for a founding year, a head count or a rate, give the same answer everywhere or leave it blank; a different year on two profiles becomes two founding years in the engine's summary, which is what happened to us on 9 October and again this week.
How long before the engine stops using the old word?
In our case six days for the schema change to reach the summary, and then one run for a profile we had not edited to put the word back. Edit the schema and the cited profiles in the same week, then re run the brand query every Friday and read the summary. Judge it by whether each phrase in the summary now traces to a page you wrote.