When AI Sounds Confident and Gets Your Business Wrong
Here’s the thing most people don’t realize yet:
AI is already answering questions about your business.
Not in the future.
Right now.
People ask things like:
“What is this company?”
“Is this a membership or a course?”
“Is it free or paid?”
“Is this basically like [other thing I’ve heard of]?”
And AI answers them.
Usually confidently.
Often cleanly.
Sometimes wrong.
The real issue isn’t that AI messes things up.
It’s that it sounds sure when it does — and the buyer has no idea anything is off.
This Isn’t an SEO Problem
Most of the advice around AI visibility is still framed like search:
How do I rank?
How do I get mentioned?
How do I “train” AI on my content?
But AI isn’t really behaving like search.
It’s behaving like an interpreter.
It reads what’s out there, fills in gaps, smooths over inconsistencies, and makes a call about what your business probably is.
And if your positioning leaves room for interpretation, AI will absolutely take it.
Where This Actually Shows Up (and Why It’s Sneaky)
This doesn’t usually show up as a big obvious problem.
It shows up as:
Leads asking questions that don’t quite make sense
People assuming the wrong pricing model
Prospects comparing you to things you don’t actually compete with
Sales conversations starting one step behind
Most founders blame this on lead quality.
A lot of the time, it’s interpretation drift before the sale even starts.
Why I Ran This on My Own Business First
Before I even thought about offering this as a tool, I ran it on one of my own brands: HobbyScool.
Nothing was “broken.”
But I could tell something was slightly off.
The way people talked about HobbyScool didn’t always match how we describe it.
And the questions coming in felt… sideways.
So instead of guessing, I tested it.
The Uncomfortable First Step: One Sentence
Before testing AI at all, I had to do the hardest part:
Write one sentence that defines HobbyScool without wiggle room.
Not a brand story.
Not a mission statement.
Not marketing copy.
Just: What is this thing?
Here’s the sentence I locked:
HobbyScool is a platform for instructor-led, virtual, free live events, with optional VIP upgrades, curated by the HobbyScool team rather than user-generated groups.
That sentence is now treated like infrastructure.
It shows up:
On the homepage
In the About section
In FAQs
Anywhere someone might ask, “Wait… what is this?”
Because if I leave room for interpretation, AI definitely will.
What the AI Was Actually Doing
Once that source of truth was locked, I tested how AI answered real buyer-style questions:
What is HobbyScool?
Is it a membership?
Is it free?
How does it work?
Is it like Skillshare or Meetup?
And that’s important.
The Problem Wasn’t That AI Was “Wrong”
Most answers were almost right.
Which is honestly worse.
They:
Correctly identified HobbyScool as online and education-based
Mentioned events or workshops
Picked up on the creative angle
But they also:
Drifted into “membership platform” language
Treated VIP as the main experience
Implied ongoing access instead of event-based participation
Compared it to platforms built around user-generated groups
None of those things are wildly inaccurate on their own.
Together, though, they tell the wrong story.
And that’s enough to change how someone shows up — or whether they show up at all.
The Fix Was Not “More Content”
This is where people usually overcorrect.
The instinct is:
Write more blog posts
Add more explanations
Optimize harder
Clarify everywhere, all the time
That’s not what the audit pointed to.
The recommendation was much simpler:
Remove interpretive flexibility at the definition level.
In plain language:
Stop letting the core of the business be fuzzy.
One clear sentence.
Used consistently.
No creative rewrites.
Once that was in place, everything else worked better without adding volume.
Why This Matters Even If AI Isn’t Your Thing
You don’t have to care about AI as a channel for this to matter.
If someone is on the fence and asks AI a quick question about you, AI becomes part of the decision — whether you planned for it or not.
And AI doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to sound confident.
The Shift This Forced for Me
Running this audit changed how I think about brand strategy.
Less “messaging.”
Less “storytelling.”
More instruction.
If you don’t clearly instruct the system what’s true,. repeatedly, consistently, without interpretation, it will infer.
And inference is where things go sideways.
Final Thought
This isn’t about panicking over AI.
It’s about not being casual with clarity anymore.
If people are asking AI about your business, then AI already has an opinion.
The only question is whether you’ve checked what it’s saying and whether it lines up with reality.
If you’re wondering how I actually ran this audit, the prompts, the comparison logic, and the way I turned AI answers into a concrete action plan, I built it into a system.
It’s called The AI Perception Execution System GPT, and it’s the exact process I used for HobbyScool.
