Tracking 'is [brand] still in business' defensively saved a deal last week
Slightly embarrassing to admit I wasn't tracking this, but: a prospect emailed us last week saying they'd asked Perplexity 'is [brand] still active' and gotten back a vague answer that implied we might have gone quiet.
We haven't — but our blog hadn't been updated in 4 months and our last press mention was from late last year. Perplexity was basically doing pattern recognition on our content freshness and producing an 'unclear' signal.
Added 5 defensive prompts to my tracker immediately:
- 'Is [brand] still in business'
- 'Is [brand] active'
- 'Is [brand] legit'
- 'Who is behind [brand]'
- 'When was [brand] last updated'
The fix wasn't technical, it was just: publish something. Anything. We pushed a 400-word changelog post, updated our About page with a 2026 date, and made sure LinkedIn showed recent activity.
Perplexity's answer changed within 9 days. ChatGPT took 4 weeks.
The meta-point is that AI engines infer 'is this company alive' from freshness signals, not from your About page saying you're alive. A static, never-updated site looks like a dead company to these systems regardless of what the copy says.
Defensive query tracking is way underrated. Anyone else monitoring these?
2 replies
- Jess Wright
The 9-day Perplexity update after a simple blog post is fast. Did you do anything to accelerate the recrawl (like submitting to IndexNow or pinging Perplexity's crawl mechanism) or did it just happen organically?
ngl this is the most useful post i've read this week. The 'static, never-updated site looks like a dead company' point is obvious in retrospect but I had never framed it that way. Going to check what our last publish date looks like to an AI engine right now.