Google Keeps a Biography of Your Firm. AI Mode Is Now Reading It Aloud.
On October 28, the search researcher Dan Petrovic published a teardown that should change how every immigration practice thinks about what AI search "knows" about it. Asking Google's AI Mode a plain question about himself — his age, no quotation marks — he got an answer drawn from a source with no URL at all. It was a stored record titled "Person Biography: Dan Petrovic," with his birth year, birthplace, nationality, profession, education, and a list of "relevant webpages." It came back the same way in two separate incognito sessions.
Companies get the same treatment. In a second example, AI Mode returned an "Organization Biography" for a business: founding year, founders, headquarters, product range, related pages. None of it was summarized from a page the company wrote that morning. It came from Google's Knowledge Graph — the entity file Google keeps on people and organizations.
For a small immigration firm, that file is a second version of your practice. You didn't write it, most firms have never looked at it, and AI Mode can now answer from it directly.
A Record, Not a Summary
In September we wrote about Google turning local knowledge panels into AI-written summaries of your Google Business Profile. That is a different mechanism. A summary is generated from copy Google can currently read. If you fix your profile description, the summary eventually follows.
A Knowledge Graph biography works differently. It is a stored record about an entity — your firm, or you as the founding attorney — assembled over time from many sources and kept on file. Petrovic tied his biography to a specific Knowledge Graph entity ID and found that the version AI Mode received was richer and more current than what Google's public Knowledge Graph API shows for the same entity. In other words, there is a fuller file behind the scenes than the one most tools can see.
That has two consequences worth taking seriously.
First, a stored record can be stale. If your firm moved offices, rebranded after a partner left, or migrated from an old domain to a new one, the record may still carry the old fact until something updates it. Your website being right today does not guarantee the record is right.
Second, the record can reach a prospective client without sending them anywhere. A fact that lives only in the Knowledge Graph has no page to link to. AI Mode can state it in the answer, and the person asking never visits your site.
The Citation May Point Somewhere Else
The most unsettling detail in the teardown is the citation. When AI Mode answered Petrovic's age question, the only linked source on the page was a Wikipedia article about a footballer — an unrelated person. It was attached to the sentence about his age, even though the fact actually came from the biography, which had no URL.
Think about what that looks like for a practice. A family asks AI Mode when your firm was founded, or whether its founding attorney is admitted in your state. The answer comes from the entity record. The link next to it points to a directory listing, a news story about a different attorney with a similar name, or a page that has nothing to do with you. The prospective client sees a confident answer with a citation and has no reason to doubt either.
Immigration practices are especially exposed here. Attorney names are often shared across many people. Firms frequently have Spanish, Chinese, or Vietnamese name variants, abbreviations, and DBAs. Every one of those is a chance for the entity record to merge you with someone else, or split you into two thinner entities.
Why This Matters for Who Calls
People rarely ask an AI assistant "is this firm good?" in the abstract. They ask specific, checkable questions: How long has this firm been practicing? Who founded it? Is the office in Queens or Manhattan? Does the attorney handle removal defense, or only family petitions?
Those are exactly the fields an organization biography carries — founding year, founders, headquarters, what the entity does. When a spouse holding an I-130 RFE or an H-1B worker counting down a 60-day grace period is deciding which three firms to call, a wrong headquarters or an old founding attorney's name can quietly take you off the list.
One more nuance from the research. Earlier testing by Natzir Turrado had found Knowledge Graph facts appearing in AI Mode only when a query was in quotation marks. Petrovic's question had no quotes, and the biography still came back. Real clients don't type quotation marks, so that difference matters.
Petrovic is candid about limits: the underlying schemas came from code in a Google Earth build, which shows the structures exist but not exactly which facts carry which flags. The observed AI Mode behavior, though, is repeatable — and checking your own record costs nothing.
How to Check and Correct the Record This Week
This takes about 45 minutes the first time.
- Ask AI Mode the direct questions. In an incognito window, ask "Who founded [firm name]?", "When was [firm name] founded?", "Where is [firm name] headquartered?", and "What does [firm name] practice?" Then ask "Where did [attorney name] go to law school?" and "What bar is [attorney name] admitted to?" for each named attorney. Screenshot every answer and its citations.
- Ask for the sources. Follow up with "What sources did you use for that?" Note any answer that cites a page unrelated to your firm, or none at all — that is the signal the fact came from a stored record.
- Mark every wrong or stale fact. Old address, former partner listed as founder, wrong founding year, old domain in the links, a practice area you no longer handle. Write down the correct version next to each one.
- Fix the sources that feed the record. Start with your Google Business Profile, then your website's About and attorney pages, including Organization and Person structured data with consistent names and links to your official profiles. Then check your state bar profiles, legal directories such as Avvo, Justia, and Martindale, and any Wikidata entry for the firm or its attorneys. Use the exact same firm name, founding year, and address everywhere.
- Claim your knowledge panel if one appears. If searching your firm or attorney name shows a knowledge panel, use Google's option to get verified as the entity, then suggest edits directly. Verified entities' feedback carries more weight.
- Recheck in four to six weeks. Entity records update slowly. Re-run the same questions and compare with your screenshots.
A practical note: Petrovic also observed that Google attaches provenance and usage flags to individual facts, including opt-out signals tied to Google-Extended. If your website blocks Google-Extended, facts extracted from your own pages may be held back from Gemini-related uses — which can leave third-party sources to fill the gap. That's one more reason to decide your robots.txt settings deliberately rather than inheriting them from a template.
The Bigger Picture
For years, the question was whether your website ranked. Then it became whether AI assistants could find and cite your pages. Now there is a third layer: the file Google keeps about your firm as an entity, independent of any one page, which AI Mode can read aloud with or without a link.
You can't edit that file directly. But it is built from places you can control — your profile, your site, your bar listings, the directories that describe you. Firms that keep those consistent are the ones whose biography reads correctly when a family asks the question that decides who they call.
Clientory helps immigration law firms become visible to the families and individuals who need them most — turning AI search into consultations, and consultations into clients.
See Your AI Visibility Score → CLIENTORY.ORG