Does AI say what’s true & new about you?

Back in 2024, I asked Perplexity — at the time, the only AI careful enough to cite its sources — about an author I admired. It credited her work to … someone else. I clicked the handy citation link and landed on an article with her name right there, plain as day. The truth was one click away, and the AI still fumbled it.

Now I understand what happened. AI guesses, as a rule, and it guesses badly when the facts about a person are few, scattered, or contradicting each other. Perplexity had simply mistaken the person who wrote the article for the person the article was about — and we are all partly responsible for whether AI recognizes our body of work as ours. Responsible, but not in complete control.

The AIs are already answering questions about you, too, and there's every chance they're guessing. The 5×5 shows you what they say: five everyday questions — who you are, what you do, what you're known for, what awards or credentials you hold, what you've been up to lately — across the top 5 platforms, side by side, in about 20 seconds. Your answers will land in one of six buckets, roughly from most awesome to least:

• General agreement about who you are and what you do — and it's current.
• General agreement, but it describes an earlier version of you.
• Your identity collides with someone in your industry who has a different name.
• You're merged with namesakes of varying backgrounds and occupations.
• You're blended with one particular namesake outside your field: your digital doppelgänger.
• You're not mentioned at all.

If every platform gets you right, your online identity is deliciously distinct, you lucky duck — I'd guess an uncommon name, an established web presence, one steady path, or all three. You don't need me. Not today, anyway 😉

If you're one of the others (as I am): don't freak out. AI has no built-in way to tell you apart from anyone else with your name, so it guesses that every fact it finds belongs to the same person and puts all of y'all's work history into one bag with the shared name on the label. Or it digs up content from two pivots ago and answers with that. Super common, and fixable — mostly.

The on-screen results show the first lines of all 25 answers, plus how many citations each platform leaned on. Trade your email address for the Citation Tracker: the full answers with a link for every citation, so you can trace where the wrong stories come from — with the Online Identity Rx email course included as a bonus. The report doesn't fix anything on its own — it shows you which bucket you're in and where the trouble starts, so your effort goes into the right work instead of guessing.

When the 5×5 comes back muddled, the fix almost always comes down to some combination of three things. One of them is mine to build. Two of them are yours to tend. I will always tell you which is which — and they're not steps. They move together, each one making the others more effective.

None of them are about what most people think, either. AI doesn't care about your brand colors or your brand voice. It's looking for facts that agree with each other, and for other people vouching for them. That's not a hunch: the Princeton study that founded this whole field measured it in 2024 — content backed by citations, quotations, and statistics won up to 40% more visibility in AI answers. The receipts win.

Connection — fixes disconnected.

Your website and the structured data underneath it — the layer that tells machines, plainly and directly, who you are, what you do, and which "you" is the real one. Most websites are missing this entirely, or shipped with a broken version baked in by default. This one's mine.

Consistency — fixes inconsistent.

Every word about you, on your site and off it, by you and by other people. The old bios you haven't touched in four years, the dead landing pages, the something-you-said-in-2019 that AI keeps surfacing like it's breaking news. Getting it current, getting it to agree with itself — that's the work. Yours. I'll show you where to start.

Corroboration — fixes incomplete.

The outside voices: the bylines, the interviews, the mentions, the places where someone besides you vouched for what you know. AI trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself, and it's right to — University of Toronto researchers found a systematic bias in AI search toward earned, third-party sources. Yours, plus your publicist. I'll point you.

Connection, Consistency, Corroboration — three signals telling one story. That's the whole job.

What you control — and what nobody does

All three C's work inside a boundary you didn't set and can't move. Your website, your schema, your owned profiles: yours to change directly, today. Third-party bios, old press, directories: you can ask for updates, you can make a case, you can't command. And which AI the person used, which model, what they actually typed, whether it searched the live web or answered from memory? Not yours. Not mine. Not anyone's — no matter what they tell you.

AI is not a calculator. It's more like if a slot machine and a gumball machine had a baby — not purely random, but you'll never quite know what's going to drop. Maybe red, maybe purple, but not a taco. Which means anyone who promises to "get you cited" or "make AI recommend you" is overstating what they know. Ask them how, specifically, and watch the answer get very vague very fast.

What I can promise is a smaller thing, and a truer one: when AI comes looking for you, the real and current version of you will be right there — clear, connected, and easy to find. I can't make it choose you. What I can do is make sure it doesn't have to guess.

You know a field is new when it doesn't have job titles yet. The industry can't even agree whether this work is called AEO or GEO — so until they settle it, I'll just be Crys, and the title can wait. E-I-E-I-O.

I've spent a whole career organizing information in search of the truth: content editor, LinkedIn ghostwriter, book editor, database builder, with degrees in architecture and instructional design and dozens of websites built since 1998. I've always lived at the intersection of the words and the technology that delivers them. Where there's truth, there can be trust.

And here's the part where I level with you, cobbler's-kid style: my own online identity is a genuine mess. AI blends "Crys Wood" with a family therapist in Texas, and "Crystal Wood" gets you a whole cast of characters. So I'm doing what I'd tell you to do — claiming my middle initial, tearing my old sites down to start clean, building the content before I go asking anyone to quote it. I'm not above this problem. I'm in it with you, walking the same three C's.

I live on a practical prairie in central Montana, forty minutes from the nearest Starbucks, knitting through twenty to thirty hours of audiobooks a week. My cat is fifteen pounds of floof, cuddles, and attitude, named Horidashimono — Japanese for "lucky find" — because he picked me at the shelter, just as I was walking out brokenhearted and empty-handed.