ChatGPT Thought I Was a Man. So I Fixed My Digital Identity

A few weeks ago, I did something that I think more business owners should start doing. I searched for myself on ChatGPT.

Actually, I asked a friend to search for my brand, Sri Marketer, on ChatGPT and tell me what it would say about me. I wasn't really expecting anything surprising. I was more curious about how AI was interpreting my business and my online presence.

Then my friend told me that ChatGPT was referring to me as “he.”

“He is a marketing consultant…”

I remember thinking, okay… that's interesting. Because I'm not a he. I'm a she.
At first, it was easy to laugh about. But then I started thinking about it from a different perspective. Instead of asking, “Why is ChatGPT getting this wrong?” I started asking, “What information is ChatGPT actually seeing about me?”

I already had structured data on my website identifying me as a person. So I had already done some of the technical work to tell search engines and machines who I was. But when I looked at my About page more closely, I noticed something I hadn't really thought about before.

My About page is written more like a personal story. I'm talking about my journey in digital marketing, going back to around 2005, and sharing the different stages of my career and how I eventually got to where I am today. It's very much me telling my own story.

And because I was writing in first person, I was naturally using “I” throughout the page. I did this. I started this. I learned this. I worked on that.

There wasn't really an obvious signal telling a machine, “This person is a woman.”
To a human reader, it probably wouldn't matter. If you know me, you know I'm Sri. You can see my photo. You can read my story. You can probably figure it out pretty quickly.

But an AI system isn't sitting there looking at my website the way a friend would. It's trying to build an understanding of who I am from the information and signals it can find.

So I decided to make that signal a little clearer.

I added a natural reference to “she” in my About section before continuing with my story. It wasn't some complicated technical implementation. It was simply making something explicit that had previously been left implicit.

And that small change made me think about something much bigger.

For years, we've thought about our websites primarily as something humans read. We worry about whether the design looks good, whether the copy is persuasive, whether people understand what we do and whether the call-to-action is clear.

All of those things still matter, of course.
But there is another audience interpreting our websites now.
AI.
AI systems are increasingly trying to understand who we are, what we do, what our businesses are about, who is behind them and what we're known for. They are taking information from websites, profiles, articles, social platforms and other sources and trying to connect all those pieces together.

And here's the thing: you might know exactly who you are. Your customers might know exactly who you are. Your friends and colleagues might know exactly who you are.

But that doesn't necessarily mean you've communicated your identity clearly enough for a machine to interpret it correctly.

A human can often connect the dots without being told everything explicitly. We use context all the time. We see a person's photo, read their name, look at their story and naturally form an understanding of who they are.

Machines don't necessarily work that way. They rely on signals.

And when those signals are incomplete, inconsistent or ambiguous, the interpretation can be wrong.

That is what made this little experiment interesting to me. I wasn't really interested in “fixing ChatGPT.” I was interested in finding the gap in my own digital identity and figuring out whether I was giving AI enough information to understand me correctly.
So I made the information clearer.

I'm not claiming that adding one word magically changes how every AI system understands me. That's not the point. The point is that I found an ambiguity in my digital presence and deliberately closed that gap.

And honestly, I think more business owners should start doing this.
Search yourself.
Search your company.
Ask someone else to search for you.

Then look at the answer and ask yourself a very simple question: is this actually who I am?

If the answer is no, don't immediately blame the AI.
Maybe the AI is wrong. But maybe there are also gaps in the information you're giving it.
Maybe you've spent years building your business, creating content and developing your expertise, but you've never actually stopped to look at your digital presence from the perspective of a machine trying to understand you.
That's something I'm becoming much more interested in.
I've always been interested in marketing systems, but I think we're entering a stage where discoverability is no longer the only thing we need to think about. It's not enough to simply ask whether people can find you.

We also need to ask what happens after they or an AI system find you.
What does the system think you are?
What does it think you do?
Who does it think you are?
And is that interpretation accurate?

Because the future of digital visibility isn't only about being discovered.
It's also about being understood.

In my case, apparently, ChatGPT thought I was a man.
So I fixed the signal.

It was a very small change, but it reminded me of something I keep coming back to in marketing: sometimes the smallest gaps in a system can reveal a much bigger problem.

And that's exactly why I like testing things instead of simply assuming they work.
Find the gap. Understand why it's happening. Fix the signal. Then see what happens.