Does your company need a Wikipedia page?
No, but it helps if you qualify. Wikipedia is part of the training data for the major language models and a source AI assistants often cite. You can't buy or write your way onto it, though: your company needs independent coverage first, and the rules for editing about yourself are strict.
By Discoverable team
Why AI cares about Wikipedia
Large language models are trained on huge amounts of public text, and Wikipedia is one of the most important parts of it: it is large, structured, edited and linked from everywhere. When an assistant searches the web for an answer, Wikipedia pages also rank well and get cited. A company with a solid Wikipedia article therefore gives AI a clear, neutral description to lean on.
Who gets a page
Wikipedia only covers companies that are “notable”. In practice that means significant coverage in several reliable sources that are independent of the company, such as national or trade media. Press releases, your own website and paid placements don’t count. A solid mid-sized company may not meet the bar yet, and an article created too early is likely to be deleted.
The rules for writing about yourself
Wikipedia’s conflict of interest guideline discourages people from editing articles about their own company. If you are paid to edit, including as an employee, Wikimedia’s terms of use require you to disclose it. The accepted route is to suggest changes on the article’s talk page and let independent editors decide. Ghost-written articles that ignore this tend to be flagged or removed.
Wikidata is easier to start with
Wikidata is Wikipedia’s sister project for structured facts: name, founding date, headquarters, website, industry. Its threshold is lower, as far as we know: the item needs to describe a clearly identifiable entity backed by serious public sources, such as a company registry entry. Link to the item from the sameAs field in your schema.org data, so machines can connect your website with the entry.
What to do instead, or first
- Earn the independent coverage that would make you notable anyway. It is the same coverage that gets competitors mentioned by ChatGPT.
- Keep facts consistent across your website, company registries, LinkedIn and directories.
- If a Wikipedia article about you exists and is wrong, raise it on the talk page with sources. That also helps when AI repeats wrong information about you.
Want to know what AI says about you today?
Get a free AI snapshot