This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Profound and Jolly Search.
A company contacts a publisher to correct an outdated author byline, job title, company description, or slogan.
The publisher agrees…kind of.
They’re happy to make the change…but only after the company pays an “editorial processing fee.”
That should be a red flag for all of us. Unfortunately, I can see a not-so-distant future in which “edits for AI” become the next publisher money grab.
…And we’ve seen this before.
After Google began cracking down on manipulative links, penalized websites were expected to show they had made a “good faith effort” to remove them before submitting a disavow file. Publishers quickly realized they had leverage.
“Want us to remove the garbage link we charged you for published? That’ll be $100!”
This time, companies won’t be paying publishers to remove links. They’ll be paying them to correct the information influencing how AI describes people, products, and businesses.
Thank you to Profound for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch
Where Do AI Citations Come From?
Profound analyzed 11.8 billion citations across 29 distinct industries and 8 models to understand how our customers are being cited in AI search.
The largest source of AI citations isn’t the press, Reddit, or YouTube; rather, it is a long tail of company websites. The median Profound customer gets more citations from brand sites (competitors, adjacent companies, etc.) than any other bucket across brand, earned, and social.
AI Builds Its Answer From Everyone Else
I have very little doubt this will eventually happen if publishers aren’t already doing it. But to understand the “why,” you first have to understand why companies would care enough to hand over their credit card.
Businesses can update their websites, schema, LinkedIn profiles, and other community properties they control. What they can’t directly update are the years of articles, interviews, directories, author bios, and company profiles scattered across the internet.
AI systems don’t simply accept a company’s preferred version of itself. They consume all the information they can find, retrieve, and somewhat verify.
When the same description appears repeatedly across the web, even outdated information can begin to look current or authoritative (the verification process)
A company may have repositioned its services three years ago, but if dozens of third-party websites continue using its old description, AI systems may keep repeating it. (Fun fact: many AI results still refer to this newsletter as a weekly snapshot of search updates… because that’s what it WAS for 6-7 years before shifting to what we see today)
Your website tells AI what you want to be known for. The rest of the internet tells AI whether it should believe you.
The Next Shakedown: Pay to Update
As companies invest more and more to be visible within AI engines, they’ll start auditing the third-party sources shaping how they’re represented online and, by extension, within AI answers.
That will uncover all kinds of outdated information:
Executive and author bios
Former job titles
Company categories and descriptions
Old slogans and positioning
Products and capabilities
Acquisitions, VC funding, ownership, and partnership details
Statistics, quotes, links, and citations
Not all companies will necessarily be attempting to manipulate AI answers. It may simply want an author bio or company profile that is presented as current to stop describing a business that no longer exists in that form.
Let’s be real, though: Without the AI benefit, 99% of leadership wouldn’t give a sh*t about outdated information buried somewhere on the internet.
But once publishers realize these seemingly minor corrections can influence visibility (and potentially revenue) some will monetize the leverage they hold.
A $100 author-bio update.
A $250 company-description correction.
A $500 description tweak with a conveniently inserted link.
Maybe they’ll even offer an annual “profile maintenance” package to keep every reference current. (If that didn’t send a shiver down your spine, you may have just discovered your next revenue stream.)
I’m not suggesting every publisher will do this. But I expect these “free” updates will happen about as frequently as publishers add links to the existing brand mentions you email them about today.
Hint: They don’t. Apparently, linking to the source they already referenced is “against editorial policy.”
The publisher already controls the source. AI visibility simply gives that control new financial value.
Correction or Reputation Laundering?
There’s an important distinction between correcting inaccurate information and rewriting inconvenient history.
An outdated job title, incorrect author bio, or evergreen company description presented as current should be updated. Publishers have an editorial responsibility to maintain accurate information.
But outdated information isn’t automatically inaccurate.
If a 2018 article accurately described what a company did in 2018, the publisher shouldn’t rewrite it simply because the business has since repositioned itself. The same applies to an embarrassing quote, failed product launch, critical review, or inconvenient piece of company history.
Those things shouldn’t disappear simply because someone is willing to pay.
That isn’t a correction. It’s reputation laundering—and companies already pay BIG money for it.
Legitimate reputation management can help a company correct misinformation or rebuild trust. It shouldn’t buy the company a cleaner version of history.
As I’ve written before, ethics have to play some role in SEO and AI. The standard should be factual accuracy, not whether the subject has enough money to influence the historical record.
Publishers can charge for advertising, sponsored content, and other commercial opportunities. But charging someone to correct objectively false information crosses a line.
Accuracy shouldn’t be an upsell.
When Accuracy Becomes a Revenue Opportunity
Shocker: People are greedy and mostly willing to do anything for a dollar.
The web has monetized access, placement, links, reviews, removals, and reputation. Updates are next.
AI companies will undoubtedly get better at recognizing conflicting information and prioritizing authoritative sources. But publishers will still control much of the information shaping those answers. (You see where this is going…)
Once enough businesses connect third-party sources to AI visibility—and AI visibility to revenue—publishers will recognize the money-grab opportunity.
By the time companies realize they need the internet corrected, someone will already have built a rate card for it.
When correcting the internet starts influencing revenue, correcting the internet will stop being free.
~Nick
Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch
End of Summer Gift: Buy 3 Links, Get 1 Free
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One catch, and it’s real: this deal expires Sunday night, August 16. No extensions, no “back by popular demand.”
Thanks a ton for reading AND sharing!
The rate card only bites if you have your own version of the facts somewhere, and that is the part that is usually missing. Out of 197 online stores I reviewed across the UK, Australia and New Zealand this summer, 62 were selling with the manufacturer's product description word for word. So when an old third party profile describes that brand badly, there is nothing on the brand side competing with it. The product page is repeating someone else's text, and a model reading both finds no reason to prefer the company over the stale directory entry.
For a smaller business that reverses the order of the invoice. Paying a publisher to correct a bio while your own pages say what the manufacturer says is buying the expensive fix and skipping the free one. Where I think you are right and it will sting: once a brand does clean up its own side, those outdated third party pages become the only thing left disagreeing with it. That is exactly the moment somebody starts pricing the correction.