Your company outside your own website

Your site is not the only source and sometimes not the first

In our baseline measurement of 2 August 2026 we asked four AI engines what the company is and what it does. Two of the four built their answer on the LinkedIn company page and not on the homepage.

That is the whole chapter in one sentence. You can spend months polishing your website while the answer your customer gets to see comes from a profile you have not opened since incorporation.

The word you need here is entity. For a search system you are not a website but a thing with properties: a name, a place, a field of work and a number of links to other places where that same thing appears. That thing is built up out of everything that can be found about you. Contradictory data make it hazy. Chapter 6 calls external mentions the slowest of the four factors and at the same time the heaviest. This is why.

The six pieces of data that must be word for word the same everywhere

Word for word here means character for character. Not roughly, not recognisably. The same.

That last one deserves a sentence of its own. Your name can be borne by someone else, your address can be a business centre and your telephone number can change. Your company registration number is unique and never changes. Put it in the footer of your site and in your schema.

The practical approach is boring and it works. Make one text file with these six lines in it and from now on always copy from there. Never retype from memory, because then variant seven appears.

There is a seventh piece of data that does not have to be word for word the same: your description in one sentence. It may run differently per channel as long as the core stays the same: what you do, for whom and where. If you keep that one identical as well, it is the sentence an answer engine takes over.

sameAs: making the link machine-readable

Consistency is a clue. sameAs is a statement. It is the field in your Organization schema in which you say yourself: these profiles are about me. With that a system does not have to derive the connection from an address that happens to match.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "@id": "https://uwdomein.be/#organisatie",
  "name": "Uw Bedrijf BV",
  "url": "https://uwdomein.be/",
  "email": "hallo@uwdomein.be",
  "telephone": "+32 3 123 45 67",
  "vatID": "BE0123456789",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "Voorbeeldstraat 1",
    "postalCode": "2000",
    "addressLocality": "Antwerpen",
    "addressCountry": "BE"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/uwbedrijf/",
    "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q00000000",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@uwbedrijf",
    "https://www.facebook.com/uwbedrijf"
  ]
}
</script>

Three rules with this field. Put only profiles in it that you manage yourself and that are alive. Put the most authoritative profile at the top. Do not put search results, aggregator pages or directory listings in it that you do not control. The rest of the Organization schema is in chapter 4.

Which channels pay off and which do not

The list is deliberately short. Five channels you maintain beat twenty you once created.

Why a neglected profile is more damaging than no profile

This sounds counter-intuitive and it is the most important sentence of this chapter.

A profile you leave standing shows old data. An address from two moves ago, opening hours from before the pandemic, the mobile number of someone who has been working elsewhere for three years. That is exactly the contradiction that makes your entity hazy. There is no system that knows which version is the right one.

A profile can also be the source that an AI answer summarises. Two of the four engines did that in our measurement. What stands there is then your calling card. Kept up or not.

And an abandoned profile is an impression in itself. Zero reviews, one photo, last post from 2021. To a visitor that reads as a company that may no longer exist.

With a Google Business Profile something else comes on top: users can propose changes. So a profile you have not claimed and do not follow can change without your noticing.

The rule is simple. What you do not keep up, you do not keep. Claim it and update it or leave it out.

Creating and maintaining a Google Business Profile

You create it on the business profile page of Google. Use a Google account that belongs to the company and not to an employee who leaves tomorrow. Four choices then determine the result.

You take the name over word for word from your entity sheet. Do not stick keywords onto it, because that is against the rules and it is a ground for suspension.

The main category is the heaviest choice and many people make it in ten seconds. That category decides for which searches you come into consideration at all. Look at which category the companies use that appear where you want to appear.

The address or the service area. If you do not receive customers, you hide the address and give a service area. A post box address or the address of your accountant is not an option.

Verification runs by video, post or telephone and that can take weeks. Start on it early, because without verification there is no profile.

Maintenance after that is a quarter of an hour per quarter: opening hours around public holidays, a few photos that do not come from a stock library, a short post and answers to questions visitors ask.

Collecting reviews without breaking the rules

Ask for them at the moment the work has just been finished and the customer is satisfied. Ask for them with a direct link, by e-mail or message, so that there are two clicks in between and no search.

Ask everyone and not only those who seem satisfied. Selective inviting is called review gating and that is forbidden on most platforms. Never pay for them and do not give a discount in exchange, because that is a violation in which the risk lies entirely with you.

Answer every review, including the bad ones, briefly and in a business tone. A decent reply to an angry customer convinces the next reader more than five stars without text.

One technical rule from chapter 4 belongs repeated here: never put Review or AggregateRating markup on your site for ratings that do not exist or that stand only on another platform. That is the only point in this whole guide where Google can actively punish.

Backlinks: the honest answer

"Getting backlinks" is a popular search and the honest answer pleases nobody.

Bought links are a risk. A link that has been paid for and is not marked as sponsored is a violation of the spam policy of Google. The seller runs no risk at all and you run the whole risk. Packages with hundreds of links come from sites that no human reads. A link from a page without readers is not a recommendation.

Mentions are earned. That goes more slowly and it does work. Publish something worth referring to: your own figures, your own measurement, a template people really use. Speak at a sector event. Be the party a trade magazine calls when it needs a statement. This guide is itself an example of that approach.

For GEO something is added that does not count in classic SEO: a mention without a link is text as well. To a language model "Your Company from Antwerp does X" is a sentence in which your name stands next to your field of work. With or without <a href>. How heavily that weighs we do not know and nobody publishes it. It does change what you spend your time on: one interview in a trade magazine is worth more than ten directory listings.

What you should not do: link exchange in bulk, comments under strange blogs with your URL in them and networks of sites that exist only to link to each other. It costs time, it yields nothing and it can harm.

What you can do yourself and what you cannot

To do yourself, without help:

• Make the entity sheet with the six pieces of data. Half an hour.
• Type your own name into a search engine and go through the first two pages of results. Every profile you find goes on a list with the columns claimed, current and to be deleted. Two hours. It is the most useful two hours of this chapter.
• Claim and verify your Google Business Profile and review the category.
• Ask for reviews after every successful job. Always the same text and the same link.
• Delete profiles you are not going to keep up.

What you need help with:

• The sameAs block in your JSON-LD. For your web builder that is a quarter of an hour.
• Wikidata. There are rules around relevance and a self-made page gets removed. Only worthwhile if independent sources about you exist.
• A name change that has to go through the registers. Start there and adjust the profiles afterwards, not the other way around.
• A blocked or duplicate Google Business Profile. That runs through the support of Google and requires patience.

Whether this yields anything you see in the measurement from chapter 9. External mentions are the slowest factor of the four, so expect movement after months and not after weeks.

Would you rather not do this yourself: SEMANU carries out the full SEO and GEO audit for 1,450 euro, report and working session included. What it covers is on the guide page.