A machine reads literally
Berger+Team · Oct 7, 2026
Topic: Found on Google
Picture someone who knows your surname in exactly one spelling. If the doorbell says it differently — hyphenated, without the umlaut, with one space too many — they say: never heard of them. Not out of malice. They simply know that one string of characters.
A machine reads exactly like that. It breaks your page into small units and compares strings — we explain it in How an AI reads your website.
Two spellings, thirty positions apart.
One space in the query costs the same page thirty positions. For the search “cookieless” our glossary page appears 48 times in the results, at position 32. For “cookie less” — the same word, just with a space — 15 times, at position 63. Both figures come from our own Search Console, as of 6 September 2026.
Same page, same content, same meaning. To a person that is a typo. To a machine they are two different words.
How Search Console shows whether Google already knows a new page is covered in New page live.
It happened to us.
Two of our articles wrote “cookielose Statistik”, the inflected German form. The term itself, though, was stored only in its base form: Cookieless. The machine saw two unconnected things — a text here, a term there.
The connection appeared only once we added the inflected forms. Retroactively, in the body text of every article that uses the word. We did not rewrite a single line. We simply said once how else that word is written.
Your words have variants too.
Every business has terms that can be written more than one way:
- The place. South Tyrol, Südtirol, Alto Adige, Sudtirolo.
- The service. Refrigeration systems and cooling technology. Electrical installation and electrician.
- Your own name. With Ltd, without, with “&”, with “and”.
- Abbreviations. AI and artificial intelligence. NAP and name, address, phone.
A person makes that connection in their head without thinking. A machine does not. It needs the variants written down — by you.
But not in the body text.
Scattering every spelling through the text is the obvious idea — and the wrong one. It makes the text unreadable and achieves the opposite: term stuffing is the only method studied that pushes visibility in generative answers below the baseline. Demonstrated in the Princeton GEO study (KDD 2024).
The variants belong where the term is explained once. From there they act on everything that points to it.
That is exactly what a maintained glossary is for. In btlabs Core every term carries its synonyms and inflected forms with it. Add a variant and it connects retroactively to the body text it appears in — per language, because German and Italian have different variants.
The one thing to take away.
A machine does not reliably reconcile spellings on its own. Tell it yourself how else your word is written. Otherwise chance decides whether it finds you.
Frequently asked questions.
Can an AI confuse my business with another one?
Yes, and it happens more often than people assume. AI systems map a name onto an entity — a single unambiguous thing in their model of the world. If the name is shared, or the data about it contradicts itself, statements land on the wrong company: someone else’s opening hours, someone else’s services, someone else’s reviews.
We know this from our own experience. Our name is held by several organisations worldwide, among them an AI company of the same name. Searching for the short form, we rank only sixth; for the full name, first — a snapshot, not a fixed value.
There is no trick for this, only unambiguity: the same spelling of name, address and phone number everywhere, machine-readable company details on your own site, and cross-references between the profiles that genuinely belong to you. The clearer the signals, the harder the confusion. A single entry is not enough — it is the sum that counts.
Why does an AI recommend me with the wrong number or opening hours?
Because AI assistants mostly pull their facts from map and directory data. If your details are inconsistent or outdated there — an old number, a wrong opening hour — the AI picks up exactly that and states it confidently as an answer.
Directories also often copy from one another, so a single error spreads across several platforms. For your business, that means a small inconsistency in one place can end up as a wrong answer in several AI responses.
What do I do about outdated listings on portals and directories I don't have access to?
Getting it corrected is almost always possible — even if you never created the listing yourself: most portals and directories offer a "claim your business" or correction process that hands you back control of your own entry.
The practical path: start with the sources that matter most — the map service, the major industry directories, the review platforms you show up on. Claim your listing on each one and unify the details: name, address and opening hours need to match your own website exactly — it's the leading source everything else should follow.
The effort pays off beyond the correction itself: AI systems cross-check multiple sources before recommending you. The more consistent your details are across every platform, the better the chance an AI cites you reliably. Your own digital foundation is the reference point — the place you align every outside listing to, instead of chasing down each outdated directory one by one.
