Wikipedia, Reputation, and the Rise of AI: What Every Business Should Know ...with Bill Beutler

Summary

In this episode, Jeffro and Bill Beutler discuss the significance of Wikipedia for brands, particularly in the context of SEO and reputation management. They explore the challenges smaller businesses face in gaining visibility on the platform, the importance of notability, and the strict guidelines surrounding edits. Bill shares insights on how to navigate Wikipedia effectively, manage negative coverage, and build a long-term online reputation strategy that incorporates earned media and proactive engagement with the platform.

Takeaways

• Wikipedia has become a crucial part of the internet infrastructure.
• Smaller businesses face challenges in gaining Wikipedia visibility.
• Notability is key for creating a Wikipedia page.
• Wikipedia editors are vigilant about self-interested edits.
• Conflict of interest rules discourage direct edits by business owners.
• Companies should focus on earned media to build Wikipedia presence.
• Negative coverage can be balanced with positive information.
• AI tools are reshaping how information is sourced and presented.
• Wikipedia is a significant source for AI training data.
• Proactive engagement with Wikipedia can improve brand reputation.

Chapters

00:00 The Importance of Wikipedia for Brands
10:32 Understanding Notability and Wikipedia's Guidelines
19:05 Navigating Reputation Management on Wikipedia
26:51 Building a Long-Term Online Reputation Strategy

Links

https://www.beutlerink.com/founder-william-beutler
https://www.linkedin.com/company/beutler-ink
https://www.instagram.com/beutlerink/

Free Website Evaluation: FroBro.com/Dominate

Transcript

Jeffro (00:01.36)
Welcome back to digital dominance. If you've ever googled a company or public figure, chances are one of the first results you saw was their Wikipedia page. But most brands don't realize just how influential that presence is, not just for human searchers, but for AI reputation and even SEO. So today I'm joined by Bill Buetler, founder of Buetler Enterprises, a digital agency that helps brands navigate Wikipedia the right way.

From Fortune 500 companies to notable creatives, William and his team specialize in ethically improving Wikipedia coverage, helping brands gain visibility in search and stay compliant with the platform's strict guidelines. So we're going to talk about why Wikipedia is a high leverage SEO and reputation asset, how companies unintentionally sabotage themselves on the platform, and what it really takes to build trust and visibility in today's AI-driven search landscape. So welcome to the show, Bill.

Bill (00:53.816)
Thank you very much for having me here. It is great to be here. Let me just start with one minor, minor correction, is are, butler Inc. is our trade name. However, if you are to go into the state of Delaware and look us up, we are butler enterprises there. So you are at your own point.

Jeffro (01:10.214)
Got it. I left it out just for brevity, so I apologize. Well, let's start here. Why should a service business owner, even a small local firm, why should they care about Wikipedia?

Bill (01:15.116)
very wise.

Bill (01:23.938)
Well, anybody should care about Wikipedia simply because of the reach that it has, the authority that it has. It's funny how a website that started off as being regarded as a joke or untrustworthy nearly a quarter of a century ago that it began now has become part of the infrastructure of the internet. And so if you can get placement,

on Wikipedia, is easier said than done, as we'll talk about, I'm sure. It can be a very powerful place to be. I think it is more of a challenge for your smaller businesses, the ones that have not got the kind of news coverage, notoriety that a larger organization will have. And so it could be helpful to have somebody who knows Wikipedia to kind of shepherd you through the process of what do you need to get placement on Wikipedia?

Jeffro (02:16.569)
Yeah, well, I before we get to that notability piece, I'm also curious, are people still searching on Wikipedia? Because it seems like Perplexity and ChatGPT are kind of taking over our old search and research habits.

Bill (02:29.366)
As a matter of fact, according to similar web, chat GPT just notched above Wikipedia on the top 10 global websites. Wikipedia has been like number seven for many, years. ChatGPT.com just overtook it. That said, I don't think very many people ever went directly to Wikipedia to do a search. I think most people started at Google. Maybe they started Bing, but I'm guessing they started Google.

And kind of like with Reddit, there's the common thing, if you want a real person's opinion, in Google, type in your thing, and then add Reddit to it. mean, adding Wiki to the end of a search, I think, is a fairly common thing to do, if even the fact that Google doesn't already, as you said, serve up Wikipedia near the top of most search results. There are some things like hotel reservations.

that have been so heavily SEO'd that Wikipedia doesn't show up. But for most companies, it'll be their main website, one number one, and then Wikipedia will be number two if they have a page. And so I think that its relevance is actually not only undiminished by the rise of AI and LLMs, I think it's actually increased simply because as much as Google ever and continues to rely on Wikipedia to

kind clean up its search results and provide reliable information for its knowledge panels. If you ask any question of chat GPT that requires it to go search the web for an answer, Wikipedia is almost guaranteed to be in the response. And the same is true of Perplexity as well.

Jeffro (04:14.874)
Gotcha. So do these new AI search tools, are they weighing different sources differently? Like Wikipedia obviously has greater authority, it's been around longer. Does it consider that as a higher value of truth when deciding what to show to the user?

Bill (04:31.938)
Well, so this is a really, you're asking about a really kind of new area. know, what are the weights of Wikipedia compared to other sites? You know, there are a few things that I can say definitively, like, so Common Crawl is this big scrape of the web that is kind of quasi-legal, because it hoovers up everything. It's well known that that is foundational training data for basically, it's table stakes for any LLM.

Jeffro (04:35.834)
Mm-hmm.

Bill (05:00.842)
And Wikipedia is the second highest, what is it, by volume. It's like the second most of any source of any URL in there is Wikipedia. Number one, believe it or not, is Blogspot. Blogspot.com. I think just because people made so many Blogspot blogs back in the past and they're all still up there and they all contain genuine writing by people that it can train on. But like Wikipedia,

is almost the perfect website for SEO, well, it's almost the perfect website for LLMs to train on, just as it was previously the perfect website for SEO, for search engines, because of the structured data. Because the anchor text is connected to highly relevant text, it is perfect for connecting things and figuring things out. mean, Wikipedia taught AI everything it knows.

And that's going to continue to be the case. And it also goes back to it for specific questions. So how much is it being weighted versus other sites? Don't have the answer for you, but that was always true of Google. Google's a black box. OpenAI, Anthropic, they're black boxes too.

Jeffro (06:15.811)
Gotcha. Well, that makes sense. And I totally agree. see how structured it is with all the markup. And that obviously helps AI categorize the content and see what's related to what and everything. So let's talk for a second about the strict rules that are around conflicts of interest and staying neutral. So when people are trying to update their pages, talk about some of the mistakes that people make when they're trying to do that, or even how do we approach this?

Bill (06:42.414)
Yeah, well, I kind of look at it along two different vectors. One would be if you have an existing article that is about yourself or about your industry versus if you don't have an article and you want to try to get one. So really, though, in both cases, the biggest mistake usually made is just barging in and kind of trying to make all the edits yourself. you know, just really the mistake in a weird way is acting like you're a normal Wikipedia editor.

Because really, if you are anybody who is interested in Wikipedia and decides to create an account, or honestly, you don't even need an account to edit Wikipedia on most pages, you can go in. And if you have material to add that improves the subject, then you can do that on any page you like to. Except, except, if the article is about yourself or your company or a product or your boss, Wikipedia editors are

pretty good just about kind of watching patterns to detect who is making kind of self-interested edits on behalf of themselves. It's a lot more common, I think, just with editing existing articles because they're there, it's easier to edit an existing article. And creating a new article that requires more research and figuring out how one goes about that. So the point I mean to make here is if you are a business owner,

or if you are the brand manager for any product service or anything like that, the thing really to do is to read up on those conflict of interest rules that Wikipedia has. They, believe it or not, do not flatly forbid you from making direct edits to Wikipedia. They do, however, strongly discourage you from doing that. And instead, what they say you should do is create a Wikipedia account, say who you are and who you represent, and then if you are a

want to work on an existing article is to go to that article's talk page and post a message and tell editors what's wrong with the existing entry. You can provide new material. It requires you to do some research and learn Wikipedia's rules. But you can post up a request. And there's a couple steps to take. But you can eventually get an editor to review it. And if you've made your point, then they may make the change for you. When it comes to creating an article, there's a specific project called

Bill (09:09.612)
articles for creation, where what they want is for newbies, outsiders, and people with a COI, that's the abbreviation, to basically write their articles in a draft space, a sandbox, and pop it into a queue, and wait for a volunteer editor to review it. All these things are very more easily said than done just because, let's face it, they're writing an encyclopedia, the bar to contribute meaningfully to

not just an encyclopedia, but one that has been around for almost a quarter century, is not easy. So this is one reason why there are consultants like myself who help companies and, you know, entrepreneurs walk through that.

Jeffro (09:52.757)
Right. So, I mean, obviously if I go in there and say, hey, this article about websites and digital marketing, you should add a line that says, you know, there's agencies such as Frobro Web Technologies with a backlink. Like, they're going to just shut that down because I'm clearly, that's self-interested edit, right? And it's not really helpful to the rest of the people reading that article who trying to read about the topic. what, when we talk about actual companies that haven't impacted, what is that?

Bill (10:10.068)
Right,

Jeffro (10:22.268)
step. We talk about the notability requirement. How do you get to a point where you do qualify? Do have to invent something or do you have to serve a certain number of people? What does that actually look like?

Bill (10:32.846)
It's a really good question. yeah, you're onto something with Wikipedia is looking for, and the phrase they use is a claim to notability. You'll find that in the notability guideline if you go looking for it. And that would be the first at something, the most of something. There are a number of things that could be, what is that hook? You need a hook, I guess. That's basically the way to put it. Wikipedia editors will not just grant a page to say,

a lawyer who shows up in the newspaper a lot. That could just be routine coverage is a phrase that you'll hear from Wikipedia editors because people have come to understand that in order to get on Wikipedia, you need to have a critical mass of news media attention. But what actually counts as the kind of media attention that Wikipedia editors think counts is a whole thing unto itself. And so a lot of times you will get

say a spokesperson or a C level executive who gets quoted a lot on the their areas of expertise. And they'll come to us and say, hey, like I'm in media a lot. You know, we get an article here. But it turns out that for the most part, they're not talking about they're not quoted about that. They're not being interviewed about their own company. They're being interviewed about the industry. So there's no actual information to use from that story.

or that interview to put into an article about themselves. And people get it once it's explained, but they don't immediately think that. They just think, hey, I've got a lot of press. I probably qualify for an article, right? Most of the time, no. What you really, really need is for a big publication, like a mainstream, maybe a national publication, to write something about why you or your business are interesting, how you're changing the game. And most companies,

Don't, right? Most companies are just, I mean, like you and I both run, you know, digital marketing slash PR agencies. And boy, I've been a Wikipedia editor for longer than I care to admit, but like there's no Wikipedia article about me or about my business. And I don't have an expectation that there will be anytime soon, which is fine. know, Wikipedia articles can also be a bit of a double-edged sword because you can't control what they say.

Jeffro (12:59.583)
Exactly.

Bill (13:00.376)
So it's such an attractive place to be, but it is also, there's so many question marks around how it's done.

Jeffro (13:07.989)
So should we even consider this now as we're building out a digital footprint? Maybe in the future we'll be big enough. Or should we just wait until we're big enough and then turn our attention to Wikipedia and say, OK, let's see what we've got here.

Bill (13:22.338)
Yeah, so we never say that anybody should begin their marketing plan with Wikipedia. It really should be the capstone on a successful earned media campaign. There's marketing and there's PR, and they have a close relationship, and they're a little bit different. But if you do marketing where you have your own owned channels, your own channels are never going to be something that Wikipedia editors will look to. They're going to look to the earned media from

you know, reputable publication. Another phrase you're surely familiar with and listeners might be as well is reliable sources. Wikipedia does not actively maintain a list of sources they consider to be reliable. They kind of have a multi-part test for which kinds of sources count. Because like truly even a publication like say, take Bloomberg is one of your gold standard news publications. They also maintain like an index, you know, of companies.

that are not considered to be part of the editorial product that's not being written by Bloomberg journalists, is being maintained by somebody who runs the database on the business side. And so if you have a listing in a Bloomberg index, that's really nice, but it's not going to help you get a Wikipedia article. It's not the same thing as Bloomberg writing about you. If Bloomberg writes about you, you're getting into territory where you're probably going to get an article at some point. But yeah, so wait to the end. Wait, wait.

Jeffro (14:46.932)
Gotcha.

Bill (14:49.123)
Get as much press as you can and then come talk to someone like me.

Jeffro (14:52.968)
Gotcha. So what about when you get to that point and you have an article, but maybe you're getting either poor or misleading coverage on Wikipedia. What can that company actually do about it without, you know, getting banned or shamed in the edit history or whatever else might happen?

Bill (15:01.179)
yeah.

Bill (15:06.614)
Yeah. Which they try. Let me tell you folks definitely will come to us after they have already gone down that route. I mean here's the here's one of the challenges of course is that like Wikipedia just reflects what is out there in the media. And so complaining about bad coverage on Wikipedia is a little bit like shooting the messenger that the you know it wasn't.

Jeffro (15:32.051)
Yeah.

Bill (15:34.232)
Granted, if somebody does start writing bad stuff about you on Wikipedia that does not have any source, that can come right out. In fact, you should always be careful about air on the side of not directly editing Wikipedia. But if there's false defamatory information and there's no source for it, nobody really ultimately is going to fault you for going in and taking that out. There's almost 7 million articles in Wikipedia, and there's like 100,000 some active editors. There's just not enough to go around.

But if there's negative press about you, there's a chance that it's going to be in the article somewhere. And so we certainly work with companies, especially large companies, where they do have some spots on their environmental record, or they've been involved in some lawsuit in the past, or maybe even ongoing. And so what we look at is, one, is this material being presented neutrally? Also, are there more details that are really necessary for the reader to get the idea?

because sometimes the people who write those sections are the ones who are especially animated about it. And they might kind of overdo it. That's an opportunity for us to come in and say, hey, we're representing this company. We've noticed that this section is like, it's just too much, man. And editors who have cooler heads oftentimes will agree, yeah, we can actually pare this down. This is too much. And then the last thing that really we do is to not focus so much on the problem content itself, but what is around it.

because if the I think there's there's one very famous retail chain that we have worked with over the years. When we first started working with them over a decade ago, their article was like three quarters controversy about some bad policies they had in the past. And I mean, those things were all true, but they also had been mostly changed over time. And so

What we did was we did a lot of research to find what else could we write about this restaurant. And I remember this is a decade ago. And one of our details we got in there was that it was Taylor Swift's favorite restaurant chain. So if you Google that around, you can figure out who I'm talking about. And so what we did was we added a lot of stuff that was neutral to positive. And then the negative section went from being 3 quarters of it to being maybe a fifth of the overall. And that felt a lot more balanced.

Bill (18:00.494)
So we're trying to bring balance to the articles. Yeah.

Jeffro (18:03.517)
Yeah, and that makes sense. So rather than trying to erase the negative history, like focus on adding what came next, know, finish the story on a positive note and make sure that it is presented in a neutral fashion and not just somebody trying to slander you.

Bill (18:17.198)
Exactly. There are people who will try to use Wikipedia as a hatchet to bludgeon their opponents, but those people are not, those people are usually not serious Wikipedia editors. And if you're an outsider, if you run a business and there's, know, Wikipedia has a page about you, from the outside, you can't tell really which editors are serious editors who are there to build an encyclopedia and which ones are there to push an agenda.

Jeffro (18:18.821)
Makes sense.

Bill (18:44.994)
The former is far more common, but the latter certainly can be a challenge, even for Wikipedia editors to deal with.

Jeffro (18:52.817)
All right, well, let's talk for a second. How has generative AI kind of changed things in terms of reputation management and how information from Wikipedia is repurposed or quoted?

Bill (19:05.006)
I mean, that's a heck of a question, and that's one where the... I'm actively studying and the question continues, the answer is evolving. You know, like I said at the top, Wikipedia is one of, if not the most influential sources of data and information for AI. So anything that is on Wikipedia and it's wrong, or if it's right, mean, potentially could be reflected in untold numbers of AI answers.

And so as yet, there is not a great system for making comparisons and kind of doing like an AI reputation check. This is something I'm actively looking into. And I've also heard other, say, entrepreneurs and PR and marketing people come up with different phrases for LLMO, like LLM optimization, or AIO, AI optimization, or AI reputation. This is...

This is, think, a really interesting area to be looking at. And it is too soon for there to be any consensus around it. But I am one person who would like to help answer that question. one thing I can say is that it's going to have some kind of effect on the work that we do. Because Wikipedia is one important component of what people learn about when they look up any topic on AI or on LLMs.

And truly, I do feel like the AI chatbots are the new Google search. Speaking for myself personally, I probably use chat GPT three times as much as I use Google at this point in time. I will have a question in mind, and I think I'm going to ask this. I'm going put this on Google. And I'm like, wait a minute. I'm just going to get an AI overview answer. And I trust GPT a little more than I trust the Gemini overviews. And so.

Yeah, and then the question, I think, what I thought you were gonna ask me in the first place was about how writing articles has changed. Couple years ago, we were talking to a crypto company who were talking about working on their Wikipedia article, and they were surprised to learn that we didn't use AI to write our articles. Granted, this is before GPT-4, so it was still nascent at the time. I mean, we were surprised that they thought that we could.

Bill (21:29.378)
So subsequently, we've tried multiple experiments, one we wrote about in our blog a couple years ago. Can we write a satisfactory Wikipedia article using GPTs, our weapon of choice? I mean, the answer is no, absolutely not, especially something that you want to past-buster with a Wikipedia editor who's reviewing your content. Like, it does a pretty good job of the imitation game. It sounds like a Wikipedia page, but it cannot do

research that actually matches up. There may be some version of this in the future that can, but right now, even the deep research, I tried to set deep research to do some work for me to write a Wikipedia article, and it was just not useful, not useful at all.

Jeffro (22:14.637)
Yeah, like it will get there, but for now it's still Yeah

Bill (22:18.388)
It may well. There's always this question about whether we've kind of maxed out on the available training data, right? So, I mean, one of the most interesting conspiratorial theories I heard about why Elon Musk wants into the federal government is because it's the treasure trove of AI training data that nobody else has. A little scary, but also not terribly implausible.

Jeffro (22:43.92)
Well, it's funny you mentioned, you know, how often you use chat GPT versus Google and stuff. When I switched my default assistant to perplexity from Google, like there's that moment of hesitation, like I feel, am I betraying Google by switching this off? Like, what am I giving up by doing this? But at the same time, it's like, it's given me better answers and more helpful responses. And so I'm, all right, I'm going to use that for now until Gemini somehow catches up.

Bill (22:57.806)
Yeah.

Bill (23:06.786)
Yeah.

Bill (23:13.026)
Yeah. Is GPT your other, it sounds like perplexity is your primary chat bot tool.

Jeffro (23:20.782)
So I just recently switched to Perplexity on my phone, because I use that just for quick queries and searches instead of going to Google. But I use ChatTPT for any work stuff where I'm helping come up with topics for podcast questions or drafting posts for social media that I'm going to go in and edit. there's a bunch of stuff like that that I use it for that saves me a ton of time. So for that, ChatTPT, Perplexity is everything else right now.

Bill (23:43.182)
Totally.

Bill (23:46.85)
I might go back to perplexity. been maybe a couple months since I used it, but I did like what I found there when I had used it before.

Jeffro (23:53.675)
Yeah. So, I mean, there's so many platforms, obviously, and Cloud is another one. Some people say, Cloud writes better content scripts than chat GBT. So it's like, OK, well, I don't want to have all the platforms. I kind of need to find one that's pretty good and maybe stick with that for most of the time. But it is interesting to try and stay on top of all the different platforms. They're all competing with each other to try and be better. The nice thing about chat GBT is it is big and has a lot of money behind it. And so they are making

Bill (24:00.323)
code.

Bill (24:05.518)
Yeah.

Bill (24:10.478)
Certainly.

Jeffro (24:22.818)
big advancements very quickly. And we see that with some of their image generation and now Sora with the videos and stuff. It's like, okay, we're getting there.

Bill (24:28.738)
Mm-hmm.

doing some amazing stuff, no doubt.

Jeffro (24:34.188)
Yeah. So this is all very cool. Last thing before we wrap up. Are there any like red flags or things a company should notice where it's like, Hey, you probably shouldn't touch your own Wikipedia page ever.

Bill (24:47.022)
You know, it's rare. It's rare where you can't have some kind of salutary effect on your page. Some years ago, a friend and former colleague who was working with a company that was in some lawsuit, I looked at the page for him and the page was kind of a disaster zone, but also there were other controversies that were not currently mentioned. And I was like, man,

I don't say this very often, but maybe this is one time where you just want to leave it be. Because if it can be a hornet's nest and you kick it, you know, it might... If that's a company that really had some serious issues, right? For the most part, if you are a company and there is some material that's negative on Wikipedia, like I say, nine times out of ten, or maybe even more, there's going to be something you can do to help bring additional context, ameliorate it in some way or another.

I rarely should you just completely leave it alone to the volunteers because as much as I respect Wikipedia editors, many of them are my friends. When it comes to writing about a company, they won't have all the context. Almost any page can benefit from having someone at the company representing the company, you know, in an open manner, even just sitting on the talk page being like, actually, here's the thing you're missing or here's another thing.

It is better to do, better to be aware and better to be proactive and be respectful than to just let it go.

Jeffro (26:19.372)
makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you, Bill, for being on the show today. Wikipedia is one of those platforms that kind of quietly shapes how people and now AI perceive our businesses, but it's often overlaid, overlooked. So I'm glad we had the chance to pull back the curtain a little bit, explore how it really works and get some ideas here. For those of you guys listening, you can find links to connect with Bill and learn more about his work in the show notes. Let's close with one final question, Bill. So for a business that wants to build a long-term online reputation strategy,

Bill (26:27.904)
yeah.

Jeffro (26:47.051)
How should they think about Wikipedia's role in that bigger picture?

Bill (26:47.096)
Mm-hmm.

Bill (26:51.718)
That's a really good question. And I think the answer is that it, well, the first part is it has to be in there, right? It is the, it is a reputation platform that everybody is looking at, even if they don't want to say that they're getting the information from there, they definitely are. I would think in terms of building a PR strategy, if you're looking for earned media, think about what information on your Wikipedia page is missing that you would like to get added there.

That is something that you should focus on trying to get someone to write about. And if there is something on the page that is wrong, even if it's cited to a source, but you know that it's wrong, see if you can get a journalist to write a new story that updates it correctly. Increasingly common example of this is when an individual maybe got divorced a few years ago, but that never got coverage.

I have a client I'm working with where a client was divorced a few years ago, never got coverage, and we're having the darnedest time trying to get Wikipedia to recognize this fact. We have the record of it, but it hasn't been in the media. And so the big picture reputation question is, think about how you might like to see coverage you are seeking on Wikipedia.

Maybe you wouldn't. don't know. That's a whole multifaceted question. I don't know if I answered it well, but it's one that's worth thinking about.

Jeffro (28:23.852)
This kind of like looking at Wikipedia and using that as kind of a glimpse into the future and building on that. Like, okay, what future do I want to create? Go talk about that, go get coverage and build that so that it eventually gets absorbed back into Wikipedia and comes full circle. Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here, Will. And thanks to all of you guys for tuning in. If you found this episode helpful, would you do me a favor, leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify?

Bill (28:40.547)
That's well said.

Jeffro (28:51.818)
It really helps more service business owners discover the show and level up their digital presence. So that's it for today. Take care and we'll see you in the next episode.