From the Scale Your Business with Data Podcast - Episode with Josh Greene, CEO of The Mather Group

The Hidden Truth About Wikipedia's Power

Here's something that might surprise you: Wikipedia isn't just another website your customers might visit. It's the invisible force shaping every AI conversation about your business, every voice search result, and increasingly, every first impression potential customers have of your company.

Josh Greene, CEO of The Mather Group and author of "Wikipedia for Business 2025," joined me this week to reveal why this "encyclopedia anyone can edit" has become the internet's most trusted—and most frustrating—source of business truth.

Three Eye-Opening Insights

1. You Can't Edit Your Own Wikipedia Page (And That's Actually Good)

The Wikipedia rule that businesses can't edit their own pages seems backwards until you understand the genius behind it. This restriction is exactly what makes Wikipedia valuable to search engines and AI systems—it's human-curated content without the obvious bias of self-promotion.

As Josh explained: "Wikipedia doesn't approach it like you should be the most accurate source of information about yourself. They're approaching it like an encyclopedia where everything needs to be verified."

The Data Point That Matters: Wikipedia has maintained this editorial integrity for over 20 years, which is why it now powers the large language models behind ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI systems your customers use daily.

2. Google's Algorithm Changes Are Favoring Human-Generated Content

If you've noticed Reddit threads from 2015 showing up in your search results lately, you're not imagining things. Google has deliberately tweaked its algorithms to surface more "first-party" human content over corporate messaging.

This shift represents a massive opportunity for businesses willing to authentically participate in online communities—but also a warning about the decreasing value of purely promotional content.

The Practical Implication: Your carefully crafted corporate blog posts are increasingly losing ground to genuine conversations happening on platforms like Reddit, Quora, and yes, Wikipedia.

3. The AI SEO Gold Rush Is Real (But Probably Not Worth It)

Josh revealed that many of the SEO tricks that stopped working on Google years ago—like white-on-white text—are temporarily effective on AI systems. But here's the catch: companies building entire strategies around these tactics are essentially "building their house on a really sandy foundation."

The Better Approach: Focus on creating content based on expertise, experience, authority, and trust—principles that work across all platforms and won't disappear with the next algorithm update.

Your Action Items This Week

🔍 Audit Your Digital Footprint

• Search for your business on ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity

• Compare what AI systems know about you versus your competitors

• Take screenshots—you'll want a baseline as this landscape evolves

📝 Inventory Your Online Assets

• Create a spreadsheet of everywhere your business appears online

• Document who has access to each account (Josh shared horror stories of Fortune 2000 companies scrambling to find decade-old Gmail passwords)

• Plan what you'd do if a crisis hit tomorrow

🎯 Shift Your Content Strategy

• Stop writing just for robots—create content that humans genuinely want to share and discuss

• Consider where your ideal customers actually spend time online (hint: it's probably not your corporate blog)

• Focus on consistency across all platforms rather than gaming individual systems

The Quote That Changes Everything

"You're not the customer of Wikipedia—and that neutrality is what makes it valuable."

This insight from Josh applies far beyond Wikipedia. In our rush to control our online narrative, we often forget that the most powerful endorsements come from sources we can't directly influence.

Looking Ahead

As AI systems become the default way people discover businesses, the sources these systems trust become increasingly critical. Wikipedia, Reddit, and other human-curated platforms aren't just traffic sources anymore—they're the training data for the AI systems making recommendations about your business.

The businesses that thrive will be those that earn trust across these platforms through genuine value creation, not those trying to game the latest algorithm.