Why does AI describe my company with outdated positioning?
Engines repeat what the pages they retrieve say, and old messaging often lives on in blog posts, press coverage, directories and profiles long after your site changed. No engine documents how it handles stale descriptions, so find the pages still carrying the old message and update them, and state your current positioning plainly on your own site.
Free to read, no signup. Nova compares how engines describe you with your current positioning.
What the guidance says about fresh, honest content
No engine documents how it treats outdated descriptions. Google's general guidance on accuracy and updates applies.
Check facts and update honestly
Google asks content to be accurate and warns against changing dates to make pages look fresh. Update the content, and the date, only when something genuinely changed.
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contentKey facts belong in text
For AI features, Google says to keep important content in text form and to keep business profile information current, so the clearest current statement is easy to find.
AI features and your websiteFive steps to replace an old message
Do it by hand with these steps, or hand the whole thing to Nova.
Write your current positioning
State who you serve, what you do, your main differences and what you no longer claim, in plain sentences.
Nova: drafts this from your site and asks you to confirm it.
Ask how engines describe you
Ask "What is [brand]?" and "Who is [brand] for?" in each engine. Save the answers and cited pages.
Nova: asks across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and saves the sources.
Spot the old message
Compare each description with your current positioning. Mark phrases and claims that are out of date.
Nova: highlights the claims that no longer match.
Find where it lives
Open the cited pages. Note old posts, press coverage, directories, partner pages and profiles that carry the old wording.
Nova: lists the sources still using the old message.
Update, then recheck
Revise what you control, request updates elsewhere, publish a clear current statement and re-ask in a few weeks.
Nova: drafts the updates and re-checks later.
Short on time? Nova, your AI brand visibility expert, runs this Maneuver on your brand and tracks the result.
Take it to NovaOld message, where it lives and the fix
| Engine | Says | Current positioning | Likely source | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | For agencies only | For in-house teams too | Old launch post | Update and link to current page |
| Perplexity | [OLD CATEGORY] tool | [NEW CATEGORY] platform | Directory listing | Update listing |
| Gemini | Founded as [OLD NAME] | Now [BRAND] | Press article | Request an update |
Nova then re-asks the questions at 30 days, so you see whether the old message is fading.
Take this Maneuver into your own AI agent
Get narrative-drift.md, a ready-to-use skill file with a positioning template, a comparison table and an update routine. Drop it into Claude, Cursor or any agent that reads SKILL.md files.
Skill file for Claude, Cursor and other agents
- A current-positioning template
- An old-versus-current comparison
- A source update routine
Questions, answered.
Relevant reads
All articlesLet Nova replace your old message
Nova opens with this Maneuver loaded. You approve every update before it ships.