Basics · Article 3 of 10
AI assistants, explained from zero
An AI assistant like ChatGPT or Gemini writes its answer one word at a time, choosing the most likely next word. When it needs current facts, it searches the web first and builds the answer from what it finds. It doesn't "know" your business. It repeats what it can read and confirm about you.
It writes one word at a time
Behind every assistant there's a language model. It learned patterns from a huge amount of text, and when you ask something, it writes the answer by predicting the next likely word, again and again. Google's own guidance puts it simply: these models don't look up facts, they predict likely sequences of words.1
Each word of a sentence, with the words that almost took its place. The model picks one. The others were close.
That's why answers sound fluent, and why fluent isn't the same as right.
When it needs facts, it searches
For questions about the world right now, like "a good dentist near me", assistants search the web. Google describes how its AI features split one question into several smaller searches, then put the answer together from what they find.2 That's why a page about one specific thing often does better than a page about everything.
So the assistant isn't inventing your business. It's reading about you: your website, your listings, your reviews, what others say.
Why they sometimes get it wrong
In September 2025, OpenAI published research on why models "hallucinate", which means stating something false with confidence. Its explanation: the way models are trained and tested rewards a confident guess more than an honest "I don't know", like a student who guesses on a multiple-choice test instead of leaving it blank.3
Developers notice it too. In Stack Overflow's 2025 survey, the most common frustration with AI tools, cited by 66%, was answers that are "almost right, but not quite".4
What this means for your business
- Be easy to read. If your facts are clear and the same everywhere, the assistant has less room to guess.
- Be easy to confirm. Assistants lean on what they can check against other sources.
- Check what they say about you. Ask an assistant about your business, like a customer would.
Making a business easy for these systems to read and trust is the work we do. Ask me how on a free 30-minute call.
Charted and signedOctober 2026 · Alejandro Peñuela
Every claim in this article points to its source.