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How AI Describes Data Centers

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LAST UPDATED – August 2026

Wikipedia Editing for Companies: 

Now that AI search has become so common, and Wikipedia is one of the top sources for ChatGPT, Claude and other AIs, one of the most common questions we get regarding Wikipedia is whether a company can edit its own page. The short answer is – it’s complicated, and there are important guidelines to follow.

Wikipedia’s Stance on COI – Conflict of Interest

Wikipedia’s purpose is to provide an encyclopedia of impartial knowledge. Content that is promotional, self-serving, or biased will often get flagged or removed by other editors.

Wikipedia’s official policy states:

“You are discouraged from writing articles about yourself or organizations (including their campaigns, clients, products and services) in which you hold a vested interest.”

In essence, editing the Wikipedia page about your own company is discouraged, as Wikipedia aims to ensure its content remains unbiased.

 The Risks of Undisclosed Editing

It’s crucial to understand that:

• Wikipedia editors frown upon and may penalize pages that appear to have been edited by the company without transparency.
• Your IP address is recorded and visible to others. Never attempt to edit anonymously using a company-owned IP address.
• The Wikipedia editor community actively tracks changes. Your edits can trigger alerts for engaged editors, who may swiftly revert or challenge your modifications.

Free Consultation regarding your brand’s Wikipedia challenges (and their impact on AI Models): Contact Us

The Gold Standard: Disclosed Conflict of Interest (COI) Editing

Over the past few years, a new approach to Wikipedia editing has emerged, known as “disclosed conflict of interest” editing. This method is now considered the best practice for companies seeking to improve their Wikipedia presence. Here’s how it works:

1. The company or individual creates a Wikipedia user account.
2. They disclose their connection to the subject of the article on their user page or the article’s talk page.
3. Instead of directly editing the article, they suggest changes on the talk page, providing reliable sources to support their proposals.
4. Independent Wikipedia editors review these suggestions and implement them if they meet Wikipedia’s guidelines.

This approach aligns with Wikipedia’s values of transparency and allows companies to advocate for fair representation while respecting the platform’s rules.

Why Choose Disclosed COI Editing?

• It’s compliant with Wikipedia guidelines, avoiding the risks associated with undisclosed editing.
• It allows for more aggressive advocacy on behalf of your brand, as you’ve already informed the community of your connection.
• It typically leads to better long-term outcomes and a more stable Wikipedia presence.

How We Can Help
At Five Blocks, we specialize in navigating Wikipedia’s complex landscape for our clients. Our services include:

1. Notability Analysis: Determining whether an entity has the required coverage for Wikipedia editors to accept and publish a new article.
2. Current Page Analysis: Reviewing challenges and opportunities with existing content and sources.
3. Content Planning and Drafting: Preparing content and sourcing for potential Wikipedia inclusion.
4. Community Engagement: Working with the Wikipedia editor community to review and submit proposed changes via the appropriate talk pages.
5. Vandalism Monitoring: Utilizing tools to monitor Wiki pages so that swift action can be taken when needed.
6. Foreign Language Pages: Assisting in creating Wikipedia pages in other languages, following the specific guidelines for each.

Free Consultation regarding your brand’s Wikipedia challenge: Contact Us

Important Considerations

• Wikipedia’s editing guidelines are far more intricate than they may appear. The sources, writing style, and editor interaction require significant experience to manage effectively.
• Timing is crucial. Introducing a Wikipedia page in advance of a potential crisis may be beneficial, while doing so during a crisis could backfire.
• Building a positive Wikipedia presence takes time and patience. It’s a long-term strategy that requires consistent effort and adherence to Wikipedia’s principles.

Ready to Improve Your Wikipedia Presence?

If you’re looking to create or improve your company’s Wikipedia page, we offer free consultations to discuss your options and determine the best approach for your specific situation. Our team of experts can guide you through the process of disclosed COI editing, ensuring compliance with Wikipedia’s guidelines while working towards your goals.

Free Consultation regarding your brand’s Wikipedia challenge: Contact Us

Still have questions? See our FAQ

How do I edit an error on my company’s Wikipedia page?

While anyone can edit Wikipedia, it’s best to use the disclosed COI approach.
Best is to work with an experienced firm to suggest changes on the article’s talk page, providing reliable sources to support your corrections.

How do you create a Wikipedia page?

Wikipedia has strict standards for notability, citations, and conflict of interest. We recommend consulting with professionals to navigate these requirements and increase the chances of your page being accepted and maintained.

Can you edit your own Wikipedia page?

Direct editing is discouraged. Instead, work with an experienced team to ensure you are utilizing the disclosed COI method to suggest changes on the talk page and let independent editors implement them.

Who can edit a Wikipedia page?

Anyone can edit most Wikipedia pages, but it’s important to follow the platform’s guidelines, especially regarding conflict of interest.

Can I see who edited a Wikipedia page?

Yes, go to the ‘View History’ tab at the top right of the Wikipedia page. The username of the editor appears next to each change, along with the date.

Remember, working with Wikipedia requires patience, transparency, and adherence to the platform’s principles. By following these guidelines and best practices, you can work towards achieving a fair and accurate representation of your company on one of the world’s most visited websites.

Free Consultation regarding your brand’s Wikipedia challenge: Contact Us

Typically, results for top CEOs will include their Wikipedia page, their company’s website, top news stories, and various types of profile sites, which provide a quick snapshot of facts for users.  

(Note: Perhaps the most interesting data point for many searchers is CEO salary: we found this in a previous study we did on the People Also Ask box. 22% of all questions appearing for Fortune 100 CEOs relate to their salaries.) 

We recently surveyed Google results for Fortune 500 CEOs over three consecutive years (on the same dates) to assess the changing prominence of different kinds of profile sites in their top results. 

We found that self-managed profile sites – LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook (in addition to Crunchbase, which can be self-managed) –  have remained more or less stable in terms of their prevalence on page one for CEOs.

At the same time, third-party profile sites, like Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Roundtable have slightly decreased in page one presence for CEOs over the years. Bloomberg, for example, appeared in page 1 search results for nearly 90% of these CEOs through early 2019; today that’s down to 70%.

The sites that have risen in prominence are auto-generated profile sites, which pull relevant information from multiple websites and databases to create a one-page dossier on executives. These sites, namely Wallmine, Salary, MoneyInc, and MarketScreener, have significantly risen in prominence over the years. Wallmine in particular saw a meteoric rise in 2019 – from appearing for just 1% of CEOs to 65% of them within that same year. 

What is interesting about this trend toward automatically created “scraper” sites is that they don’t seem to add a whole lot of value. What are they doing that Google cannot do by itself? Google’s algorithm already tends to prioritize pages and sites that help it answer popular questions and meet the common need for quick facts. Google does this by crawling much of the internet and then displaying the best pages and data points.

When companies do the same type of summarizing, this can be useful to visitors…but only for a time. 
Some years ago we saw the same dynamic play out with Answers.com. In order to answer questions people often searched online, that site scraped various authoritative sources and created answer pages – which ranked prominently for tens of thousands of terms. Eventually, though, Google applied a more sophisticated duplicate content filter, demoted Answers.com, found other sites that added more original value, and added its own “dossier” features as discussed above. Answers.com simply wasn’t adding enough value to last long term.

So while right now there are several automatically generated profile websites appearing for many prominent individuals, some of which can actually be managed to some extent (MarketScreener offers an option for a paid profile, for example), we predict that these sites will not retain their prominence long- term.

In our estimation, for a site to remain relevant and prominent in Google search, it needs to add unique value, providing information or an experience that other sites do not…and that Google can’t manage on its own with its own knowledge graph data.  

Ideally, sites that want to go the distance should be filling a gap – providing some deeper answers to the popular questions people have, adding images or videos where those are missing to flesh out someone’s persona, or providing information in a language that is not covered. 

Google is a reflection of what people want to see, and people seem to want to see a quick and comprehensive picture. Staying valuable will require a heavier lift for content writers and researchers. The robots – the automated content aggregators – will need to find some other, more helpful, work to do.

About the author:

Miriam Hirschman., Research Manager at Five Blocks, is driven by an endless supply of curiosity and a deep background in data analysis as she digs for the interesting stories behind the numbers. Because we believe in data and tools but believe in people even more, she reviews massive volumes of search results, seeking patterns and finding order in the often chaotic world of web search. 

Google first introduced the People also ask box in 2015. For a while, it was a low-profile feature, often appearing midway or lower down the first page. As with virtually all new features, Google did extensive testing to ensure they are useful to searchers.

By early 2017, the feature began rising in prominence, including appearing for 10-15% of Fortune 500 companies. In November 2018, the People also ask box started appearing for about 80% of companies and grew from there, today appearing for over 90% of the F500.

It appears that Google has figured out not only the kinds of questions people often ask, but that people appreciate the format as an efficient way to find information quickly. 

This new format often presents questions we would have been unlikely to ask ourselves (a search for ‘gaming fingers’ brings up both ‘how do you play the game number fingers’ and ‘can playing video games cause trigger finger’), and returns answers with varying degrees of authority, simply because they seem to match well.

That is…unless getting the right answer is a matter of life and death. Then Google interrupts its regularly scheduled algorithms to present results much differently, cutting straight to the most authoritative answer. Nothing brings this home more clearly than the way Google is handling the COVID-19 crisis.

What is going on?  Let’s take a deeper look. 

The Paths of Search

When you search online, Google does quick triage: 

If there is one unequivocal answer – as in ‘Who is the Prime Minister of Canada’ – that answer will generally be delivered in the form of a Featured Snippet or Knowledge Panel. A question and answer box will appear below this, with related questions, answered by various sources. 

If your query is something less clear, like “gaming fingers,”  Google’s algorithm is not sure of your intent, so it will generally provide a variety of different results to help disambiguate what you are trying to find; you can pick a specific path or decide you know enough from what you’ve read on the search page. 

The People also ask box captures frequent intentions – and Google figures that your intent is likely to be similar to one of them. 

But what happens when there’s a lot riding on the answer?

When the answer is crucial, like in an impending weather emergency or a search related to suicide, Google overrides its own algorithm – and provides answers that have the greatest likelihood of keeping you safe.

A Tornado warning in the searcher’s area appears in red at the top of the page when they do a weather-related search. In the case of a suicide-related query, a toll-free hotline number appears in a large font at the top of the page, with the text ‘help is available.” 

In these cases, even if Google is not sure what you are asking — and even if there are probably a variety of accurate answers to a question like ‘how to kill yourself’ — Google will err on the side of caution.

In these cases Google sacrifices variety, balance, considerations of the searcher’s own history, and any other elements of its algorithm for the most direct route to possibly saving a life.  

The Coronavirus Connection

In our current moment, searches for coronavirus or COVID-19 bring up an expanded knowledge panel — almost a mini- site — featuring symptoms, prevention, treatments, and statistics. The area is branded as a red ‘COVID-19 alert’, and all information is provided only by highly reputable sources. 

The People also ask box is farther down the page than normal, and  is referred to as “Common questions” instead;  answers are sourced from highly authoritative sources – most prominently, the CDC.  

Along with this new way of presenting coronavirus answers, Google has a new initiative to help medical organizations optimize their sites, so that their information appears prominently in Google searches, and populates the results for these types of medical questions.

SEO Roundtable has summarized the initiative here, in which Google has provided guidance for health organizations on:

• Mobile optimization 
• The importance of good page content and titles
• How to analyze the top coronavirus related user queries
• How to add structured data for FAQ content

While it would obviously be easier for Google to simply give all worthy health organizations more weight in the algorithm (using some sort of ‘authority score’), it seems to prefer that these entities assert their expertise organically. 

Even more “interventionist”: As of end March, Google began heavily prioritizing local COVID-19-related results, giving more prominence to local publishers as each country began developing unique approaches to fighting the virus.  

Balancing Act

It seems that Google is scrupulous about accuracy only when there is a specific unequivocal answer, or when it thinks there might be a case of life and death. Maybe these are the only times Google won’t be called out for using influence in unfair ways?

Google’s opening gambit with health organizations, a half step between the democratic question and answer format and the tightly controlled emergency format, might be an interesting way forward in areas where more authoritative answers may not be immediately crucial, but would be appreciated by users – like nutrition or child-development.  

In fact, all companies and professionals, following a best practices optimization strategy (titles, query analysis, FAQ content, etc.) can help establish their expertise on the results page.  By assessing what questions people ask, and by answering them in the most relevant and easily understood way, companies may be able to make sure that the answers to the questions people ask are answered by their very own legitimate expertise.

It may not always be an emergency to get the answer right, but users would surely appreciate bumping into more true experts on their search paths. 

Recently, Google appears to have made a significant change to its search results page that eliminated several in-depth articles for many clients. We’ve taken a deeper dive into this development to see what it could mean for brands and high-profile individuals, and the PR professionals who work with them.

As you know, when searching for a brand or an individual, the Google search results page presents a variety of relevant content pieces and types of media to satisfy the query. Often this means a company’s own webpage will appear at the top, followed by third-party content such as Wikipedia and news sources. There may also be social media results (if an individual or brand actively maintains these platforms), along with image results or video content.

Several years ago, Google introduced a section within top search results they called “in-depth articles”. These results looked very similar to other search results, but came from longform media outlets like Variety, Rolling Stone, or The New York Times Magazine.  Often, they were a seminal article about the brand in question – articles that may have been placed by their PR teams.

Including these articles on the top results page seems to have been Google’s way of ensuring that a greater variety (and deeper) content would appear in this prime spot. Their inclusion, and the actual articles that appeared within that section, were governed by a different set of algorithms than most search results.

Recently, this section disappeared from all search pages for brands and executives. This happened without any announcement or acknowledgment on the part of Google.  It is important to note that in-depth articles for many brands and individuals contained negative content. At the same time, it was the place where particularly engaging longform journalism made its way onto the prime real estate of Google page 1 for a brand.

The ramifications of Google’s elimination of this section are yet to be seen, and their motivation can only be assumed to be “less intervention” following high profile criticism of potential bias in their  algorithms.

A whole host of interesting questions arise from Google’s move: What is the corporate (and civic) responsibility of those who hold the world’s data in their hands? Are there cases for intervention? Who decides what those are?

It is interesting to note that alongside this mysterious  disappearance, a recent Five Blocks study of CEO search results found there are far fewer news sites (sites such as CNN, CNBC, and others) on the first couple of pages of searches for a CEO compared to a year ago. In addition, those pages feature many more  profile sites, where one would find more dry facts (often created by the brand), and less news.

This marked difference in the presence of news within the organic results over the course of the past year, alongside the recent removal of the in-depth article section, means that page 1 of search for brands and individuals will contain far more“owned” content – i.e.: information they control.

For some brands this would appear to be a positive turn of events, but for many this trend means they will not automatically have great media pieces (which they often earned by being genuinely great) appear prominently in searches. It means they will need to work harder to deliberately ensure that the best third-party media does in fact place highly within their profile. Savvy communications teams will find ways to enhance their brands’ online presence within these brave new parameters.

— Sam Michelson, with Sara K. Eisen

When crisis strikes, a company’s digital reputation becomes stressed and vital to their health.  Five Blocks President, Howard Opinsky, will offer his insights at the Summit on the impact that crises have on digital reputations and what brands and individuals can do to prepare to weather the storm.  Our team of digital reputation experts will also be on-hand to discuss how you can take control of your internet search results and shape them to best reflect your real profile.  Join us at the Summit on February 27-28 in Miami Beach and don’t miss Howard and fellow panelists as they recount some of the best handled B2B crises and best practices in crisis preparedness at two sessions on Thursday, February 28.  Learn more about the PR News Crisis Management Summit here.

Over the first half of 2018, we have seen the search engine results continue to evolve from being a doorway to information to being the destination itself. This is not only evident in the composition of the search engines, but also in how users perceive the results (per the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer).

I have continued to see clear attempts by Google to satisfy users and answer their question without any extra steps, by introducing several interesting changes to the search page functionality:

Ownership of the information

In June 2018, Google rolled out verification of the knowledge panel to more entities and notable individuals. This ability to take over the knowledge panel signals that Google wants entities to participate in providing factual information so that the searchers are provided the summary of an entity without having to search elsewhere.

Videos Carousel on the page

One of the latest changes Google has brought to the results page, following closely on the heels of Bing, is a video carousel similar to the already existing image box. While this could, potentially, reduce traffic to YouTube, the ultimate goal of immediately satisfying users apparently preempts the potential loss of YouTube advertising revenues.

Improved Search Suggests

A very recent addition to the features on the search page is enhanced search suggest.

When users click on a result and later return back to the search engine results page, Google sees they are searching for additional information and now suggests ancillary search queries directly below the original result. This feature precludes the need to do additional searches to find what the user may be looking for.

Continuous Scrolling

On mobile, Google has introduced a significant change with Facebook style scrolling, essentially creating an endless page of information. Stay tuned as this might come to all search results pages – not just mobile.

Outlook

Our outlook calls for search engines to continue efforts to provide the exact information the user seeks, ideally within the search page itself. We expect to see search engines return more content previously contained deep within other websites. It will be interesting to see how websites balance their desire to be listed within Google and Bing, and their need to hold onto their own data. Searchers will continue to demand more of the engines – who will do their part to provide the best information they can.

Instead of showing video results as before, they are now presented in a video carousel. This means that  searchers see three videos in a box, with the ability to scroll and see additional videos. (Note that Bing rolled out a similar feature weeks ago!)

The following carousel, for example, now appears in searches for “Apple”:

This is the one appearing for “tootsie rolls”:

These video boxes also impact how people see important topics like GMOs:

Interestingly, this new video box doesn’t just appear for topics where video is an obvious result; we are also seeing video carousels on page 1 for many of our clients. For example, we see it for Fortune 500 companies and their CEOs, hedge funds and their managers, hospitality brands, financial institutions, and high net worth individuals.

The videos in the carousel are sourced from sites like YouTube as well as the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Yahoo Finance. In many cases, the videos are being sourced from the brand’s official website as well.

Google has just given brands the equivalent of $1,000s in free video advertising – if they know how to leverage this new feature!

Some thoughts on what this means:

• With more clicks going to video than before, brands that weren’t previously harnessing the power of video will want to consider an appropriate strategy.
• Brands that have preferred video content should use best practices to ensure their preferred videos appear prominently. This is likely to require an ongoing effort, as the algorithm governing the choice of videos is new – not the one that determines the order in Google’s video search.
• This is a reminder to brands to ensure that their onsite video content is being properly crawled, cached, and indexed.
• The thumbnail image of a brand’s videos is now part of the first page of results. This means that it is time for brands to revisit these and to make them optimal for branding and to attract clicks.

There are still some kinks for Google to iron out. In a few cases, we saw the same video appear multiple times in the carousel, sourced from different sites. We also noted that Google hasn’t yet connected the video carousel’s content to related brands. (For example, for Target, which has an active YouTube channel, none of the six videos shown were related to the brand.)

Overall, we believe that this feature, harnessed optimally, can be valuable for brands seeking to expose visitors to engaging content. Our goal is to help brands tell their story online and video is often the best way to do just that.

If your brand or executives could benefit from having a better control of their online image, we are happy to discuss how we may be able to help.

Reactions so far are split on whether this is a good thing, with some already mourning the loss of creativity forced by the 140-character constraint. However, there is a major hidden benefit to Twitter’s new world of wordy: the way it affects your search results page.

Since August 2015, when someone Googles a term associated with a Twitter account, the search results have included a dedicated space for actual tweets from that account. That’s a win for companies, brands, and people who care about their online presence. It means their voice is right there on the search results page, in a section whose contents they completely control.

With Twitter’s newly doubled character count, we wondered if Google would come along for the ride. Would the Twitter box on the search page double in size? Or would it just cut off the tweet after 140 characters?

The answer? For Twitter boxes featuring the wordier 280-character tweets, the actual box has grown to accommodate the greater length.

This is an incredible branding gift from Twitter and Google, offering even more space in the search results for a brand (or company, or individual) to control and to tell their own story. This is the kind of space brands pay money to have on the search page.

Brands should welcome this gift with open keyboards. They have learned how to be creative in 140 characters; now it’s time to embrace the new challenge to be engaging, yet still pithy, in 280.

What’s more, companies can reap the benefits of a longer Twitter box on the search page without being needlessly wordy all the time. The box works as a carousel, allowing the searcher to scroll horizontally through a few recent tweets, beyond just the first three showing. We discovered that if any of the tweets in the box – even the ones not initially visible – are longer, it lengthens the whole box.

In this new era of Twitter 280, brands have the opportunity to offer deeper thoughts, or even just thoughts that are longer winded. That’s their choice. But now it pays to be wordy – without even having to pay.