Hasty Generalization: The Brand Visibility Problem Nobody Talks About

AI is telling your brand story for you. And it's probably getting it wrong.

'Hasty generalization.'

Something I learned yesterday that explains why AI treats your product like every other tool in your category.

And it changes how I think about brand visibility.

I was testing ChatGPT on a few different SaaS products. Asking it to describe what they do, their features, how they work. Just to see how accurate it is.

And it kept getting things wrong. Not wildly wrong. Just slightly off.
Describing features that don't exist.
Mixing up what one product does with what a competitor does.
Confidently stating things that aren't true.

So I pushed back. I told it, that's not right. Why did you say that?

And ChatGPT gave me an honest answer. It said:

"I generalized from how most [category] tools work instead of verifying exact features."

Read that again.

When AI doesn't know enough about your product specifically, it fills in the blanks from what it knows about your category.

Calendar tool? AI assumes it does what most calendar tools do.
Search platform? AI assumes it has the features most search platforms have.
Email tool? You get the idea.

And that's a big problem!

Look at most SaaS websites right now. Everyone says "powerful." Everyone says "seamless." Everyone says "all-in-one." Everyone says "AI-powered."

When our messaging sounds exactly like our competitors, we're basically telling AI: "Yeah, we're the same as everyone else."

So when a potential customer asks ChatGPT about our product, they get a generic category description with our brand name slapped on it.

Not because AI is broken. But because we never gave it a reason to think we're different.

So what do we do about it?

→ Be weirdly specific. Don't just say what we do. Say what we don't do. AI fills gaps with assumptions. If we leave gaps, AI will fill them with what's typical for our category. Close those gaps before AI fills them for us.

→ Draw clear lines in our content. Write stuff that explicitly says "unlike most tools in this space, we work differently because..." Give AI something concrete to latch onto instead of defaulting to patterns.

→ Ask AI about our product. Regularly. Go ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude what our product does. If the answer sounds incorrect, we need to review what's out there about our product and where AI might be pulling from.

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This was just one of the things I learned. Will share more learnings soon.

And before anyone checks my website and @ me with "practice what you preach." - yeah, I know! There's stuff on there that needs updating, and I'm on it.

- Rohit