Why does ChatGPT still describe my company using our old positioning?

Where the old description actually lives

After a rebrand, most teams update the site, the social profiles and the press page, then wait. The description that persists is usually held somewhere else: directory listings, aggregator profiles, conference bios, partner pages, old press coverage, review platforms, and the structured data on any of those that still carries the previous entity name.

Retrieval reaches for corroboration. When five third-party sources agree on the old positioning and one first-party source states the new one, the old one wins on weight even though yours is authoritative.

Two different problems that look identical

• Training corpus persistence. The old description is inside the model. Nothing you publish removes it. It fades as newer material accumulates and as models are retrained.
• Live retrieval persistence. The old description is being fetched right now from sources that still carry it. This one is fixable, and it is usually the larger share.

Separating them is the first diagnostic step, because the fix for the second is mechanical and the fix for the first is patience plus volume.

What shifts it

• An entity audit that finds every third-party surface still carrying the old description, ranked by how often retrieval reaches it
• Correcting those surfaces directly, starting with the ones that hold structured data about your organisation
• Making the first-party statement unambiguous and machine-readable, with the same wording repeated consistently rather than paraphrased across pages
• Publishing enough new material carrying the new positioning that corroboration flips
• Monitoring the change over time rather than testing once, because single-run results in this category are noisy

What does not shift it

Rewriting the homepage alone. Adding an llms.txt that states the new positioning while every third-party source disagrees. Prompting a model to correct itself in a chat session, which changes that session and nothing else.

If this is the situation you are in, the useful first deliverable is the audit that tells you which of the two problems you have and how much of each.