What AI Really Knows About Your Business | James Dooley Interviews Dixon Jones (James Dooley Interviews Dixon Jones)

James Dooley (0:00)

WK.io, What AI Knows About You. Today, I'm joined with Dixon Jones, the founder of wk.io. And I want to jump straight in, Dixon, and say, why is it that you created this brand?

Dixon Jones (0:16)

So we, when we tried to come up with all sorts of names for the brand, and then somebody said, look, why don't we just call it what it is, you know? It's what AI knows about you. And then we shorted it to WakeAid. And we thought, great, well, now no one can spell it, no one can pronounce it, and we don't have the .com, which wasn't necessarily very clever. But it does make people start with, you know, the acronym, which is good. So the reason that we created it was it came out of our other product, Inlinks, which is an AI SEO technology. But it came out, and we did it as a separate thing. Because when LLMs came out, it was quite clear that there was going to be a market for understanding, you know, how to get your message, your brand message in the prompt responses of whatever it was that people are going to type into these machines. And it took a little bit of time, I'd say it took a good year for people to start understanding the idea of transformers and all the things that happen inside those LLM boxes.

But we decided that we wanted to build a new tool for it because if we tacked it onto our other business, we'd confuse people with two different lines of thought. So what we decided was that we had to help customers or help users understand what the AI actually knows about you as opposed to what comes back in the prompt response, which could be very, very different because there's this whole layer of search that goes on top of the LLM machine learning.

That disguises a multitude of problems. I mean, if LLMs were perfect, they wouldn't need a search engine, right? But they need a search engine almost every time. As soon as you start doing anything above how to boil an egg, then they're tending to look up on a search engine. So, I don't think Google is dead yet because they've got the best search engine, arguably. So, I think we wanted to build technologies that would help users understand what AI knows about you and probably more important, what it should be knowing about you that it hasn't picked up with. Because that topic analysis, that topic gap analysis gives a strategic direction for a marketing department on what to do about it.

James Dooley (2:44)

Yeah, for sure. And anyone who's listening to this, make sure you check out the link in the description where me and Dixon go through in-depth about entity mapping and having an entity map put onto your website. My next question to you, Dixon, with regards to what AI knows about you, I want you to give me an example where someone wants to increase AI visibility, whether it's in ChatGPT or Cloud or Google AI Mode.

They're wanting to know, okay, what bits of information do they know about the brand that might be incorrect? Is that something that within wk.io that they could be looking at to say, oh, we need to fix this, we've got a problem here, they're pulling in the wrong information or they're hallucinating. Is this where WK can be helping people?

Dixon Jones (3:29)

I've got an example of a friend of yours actually, Jason Hennessy. So, Hennessy Digital are a US agency. And way back in the day, and if you asked, this was about 12 months ago, so it's probably been fixed now. But anyway, if you've asked about 12 months ago, what do you know about hennessy.com?

Then not unsurprisingly, some of the LLM said it was a brandy company, because he owns the EY and hennessy.com, that's just why I think. That's not surprising, but it's an example of an hallucination. They put in his URL and it came back saying brandy. So there's misunderstandings in the LLM, all based around probability. Obviously, a lot of people type in the brandy, so we'll talk about the brandy, and let's talk about an SEO agency. That's understandable. What was more interesting for me was that, it also came back as it's an auto parts company.

By the way, Jason said I can talk about this when we found it. So I hope I'm not stepping on his days too much. But when we found it, he went, wow. What had happened was that back in the days, early days of SEO, there was a Hennessy auto parts company, and being the good link builder that Jason was, he went out and said, look, some people are going to be coming to you and they want an SEO company. Why don't you link through saying, we're not an SEO company. He put SEO companies, the anchor text, back in the day. Now, of course, a machine goes down, sees SEO company on Hennessy auto parts, and as a result, there's no links in their crew because their crew was not necessarily taking the link information at all, just takes the words. So it then associated the SEO company with an auto parts digital. This is the kind of example that happens a lot when you've got a name like Majestic, it's quite generic in nature, that can cause an issue. But you can also cause errors and hallucinations when you have a change director, or when you have a new product line, or you have new things happening out. The machine has remembered things from a year ago or more, and it just is embedded in its system. It doesn't really remember where it got this information from. If your version of reality is different to their version of reality, you've got a problem because when you ask a question of an LLM, or when a user asks a question of an LLM, it's going to go in and it's going to say, what do I know about that? Do I have some brands that I need to go and look up on search engines now? If you're not in the brand in the right context, then you're going to be brought out in the wrong context.