How AI models recognise your brand
AI models have to recognise who is behind a website before they name you. What counts is the brand name in the title and main heading of the start page, and an about page with clear facts.
How it works
Language models attribute content to a brand. To do so, a crawler first reads the page title (the <title> element) and the main heading (<h1>). If the brand is there, the attribution is clear. If all it finds is a slogan such as “Welcome” or “Your partner for quality”, it remains unclear whose page this is.
The about page supplies the rest: who you are, what you offer, since when, where and for whom. When someone asks an assistant about your company, it looks for exactly this information. If it is missing from your site, the assistant takes it from other sources, or guesses.
bytereport checks the first part: whether the brand name appears in the title or the H1 of the start page. As the brand it takes the website name from JSON-LD, otherwise og:site_name, otherwise the name of the organisation, otherwise the name in the domain. The organisation's name counts as well; legal forms such as “Ltd” are ignored in the comparison.
What matters
- Brand in the title or H1. If it is missing from both, bytereport warns. A title such as
Service – Brandis enough. - One consistent name. Page title,
og:site_name, JSON-LD and profiles should spell the brand the same way; see Organization data. - Facts, not marketing. Year founded, location, offering, audience, contacts: short, verifiable sentences can be quoted, mission statements can't.
- Reachable from everywhere. Link the about page in the navigation or footer so crawlers find it.
- As text in the HTML. Here too, whatever appears only through JavaScript is invisible to many AI crawlers; see text without JavaScript.
How to set it up
You set the title and H1 of the start page in your content management system: the title usually in the page's SEO settings or as a template for all pages (such as %page name% – %brand%), the H1 as the first heading in the content. More on titles under page title.
Create the about page as an ordinary page. Start with one sentence that says who you are and what you do, then add the facts. Keep it current when your offering, location or contacts change.