Garbage in, garbage out.
Your competitors can use the same models you do. What comes out of them depends on what goes in, and for a lot of brands, what goes in is a mess.
1. An old rule, a new place to apply it
Garbage in, garbage out is an old rule in computing: a system is only as good as what it is given. It matters more now than it did, because the systems writing about your brand are ones your competitors can use too.
So whatever sets your work apart does not come from the model. It comes from what the model is given to read about you.
2. What garbage looks like for a brand
It rarely looks like garbage. It looks like the material a company already has:
- A pricing page from two plans ago, still sitting in an archive and on a review site.
- A deck that contradicts the one after it.
- A statistic in a launch email that nobody approved.
- A figure with no date, so nobody can tell whether it is still true.
- A description — “confident but approachable” — where a tool needs a value.
The same model, fed two ways
- A pricing page from two plans agoStale
- A statistic nobody approvedNo source
- A figure with no dateUndated
- “Confident but approachable”Not a value
- The current price, with its sourceSourced
- Claims with an approver and a dateApproved
- Figures that expire on a dateDated
- Colour, type and spacing as valuesValues
3. It does not filter it. It multiplies it.
One stale page used to mislead one reader at a time. Now every tool that reads it repeats it, in every draft, reply and answer it writes, with the same confidence it brings to what is true.
A model cannot tell your current price from last year’s if both are in front of it and neither says which is which. It picks one, and it does not say that it picked.
4. Fix what goes in
Checking what comes out catches one mistake at a time, while the next is already being written from the same source. The fix that lasts is upstream, in the source itself.
That means a record: every claim with its evidence, a date and an approver, and every figure dated. A dated figure expires twelve months after its date, and a figure with no date is expired now — it is the rule we hold our own record to.
We grade every claim in it, too. An A may be said by anyone, a B internally and in sales with care, a C only inside the company, so a tool that reads the grade knows what it may repeat.
5. Where to start
You cannot fix an input you have not found. The diagnostic asks six assistants about you and traces each wrong answer back to the page, the post or the missing file that produced it.
That trace is the list of what to fix first.
