AI Visibility Logs
Log 001 asked four AI engines what Reforge is, using the company name. This asks the same question using only the URL, and compares the answers.
Bottom line: for one AI engine out of four, swapping the name for the URL replaced most of what it retrieved, and turned a four-month-old error into a correct answer. For another, it changed nothing at all.
The query
Asked verbatim, in a fresh session on each engine: What is reforge.com, and what are they best known for?
One word different from Log 001. The company name is gone; the URL replaces it. Nothing else changed.
Test conditions
- Log reference ID: AIVL-002
- Topic category: AI Retrieval & Source Selection
- Target subject: reforge.com (URL only, no company name supplied)
- Engines tested: Claude (Anthropic), ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Perplexity
- Models: Claude: Sonnet 5. Gemini: Flash. ChatGPT and Perplexity: auto.
- Test environment: Clean test account. Personalization surfaces verified individually. Fresh session per run.
- Runs per engine: 1
- Date of runs: 13 August 2026
- Baseline: Log 001, same question by name
- Status: Single-run. Three further runs planned; findings here are directional.
What changed
The test case is a fact with a date on it. Miro acquired Reforge in March 2026, and Reforge’s own site carries the announcement. Any engine describing the company as independent is working from a picture more than four months out of date.
Log 001 asked about Reforge by name, across four rounds. Two engines reported the acquisition consistently; two never did. Here is the same measure under the URL query.
| Engine | Acquisition reported, by name (4 runs) | Acquisition reported, by URL (1 run) |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | 4 of 4 | Yes |
| ChatGPT | 1 of 3 | No |
| Gemini | 0 of 4 | No |
| Perplexity | 0 of 4 | Yes |
Perplexity moved. Gemini didn’t. The other two held their existing positions.
One thing didn’t move anywhere. The URL changed which sources were retrieved, but it did not change how any engine described the company. Category, audience and subject matter were identical to Log 001 across all four. What a URL appears to affect is where an engine looks, not what it concludes about the basics.
Sources cited
| Engine | Citations | Unique pages | Reached corporate news? | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | 9 | 5 | No | Tracxn · reforge.com · Mind the Beet · CB Insights (×3) · Chrome Web Store listing (link broken) |
| ChatGPT | 5 | 4 | No | reforge.com · product specializations blog post · reforge.com/learning · a Reddit thread |
| Gemini | 7 | 5 | No | reforge.com (×2) · /teams (×2) · Growth Series detail page · product management category (×2) |
| Perplexity | 8 cited, from 15 retrieved | 8 | Yes | Miro newsroom · reforge.com · Preqin · businessmodelcanvastemplate · a LinkedIn programme review · a Reddit thread · PRNewswire Series B release · Chrome Web Store listing |
The fourth column is the whole result. One engine reached a page announcing the acquisition. It is the one engine whose answer changed.
Perplexity’s full 15 retrieved results — 13 August
Chrome Web Store (Reforge Build) · Miro newsroom · Preqin · PitchBook · Tracxn · reforge.com · Reddit · Business Model Canvas Template · LinkedIn company page · Mind the Beet · LinkedIn programme review · Toption · Vizologi · PRNewswire · Vendr
Compare against Log 001’s fifteen, which included ZoomInfo, Owler, Built In, SignalHire, Levels.fyi, Craft, VentureCapitalTracker, the a16z announcement, Startup Anatomy, and a Tracxn profile for an unrelated company.
Perplexity: a different corpus
Perplexity retrieved fifteen results for both queries. Almost none of them overlap.
Gone under the URL query: ZoomInfo, Owler, Built In, SignalHire, Levels.fyi, Craft, VentureCapitalTracker, the a16z funding announcement, Startup Anatomy — and a Tracxn profile for an unrelated company that also happens to be called Reforge.
New under the URL query: Miro’s own newsroom announcement of the acquisition, Preqin, the Chrome Web Store listing for Reforge Build, two independent programme reviews, a pricing aggregator, and a business-model breakdown.
Asked by name, Perplexity assembled an employer profile: headcount, salaries, funding rounds, who works there. Asked by URL, it assembled a product picture: what the thing is, what it costs, whether it’s any good, and who owns it now.
The acquisition announcement was never in the pool for the name query. Under the URL query, it was retrieved and cited first. The answer changed because the corpus changed.
The duplicate company also disappeared. In Log 001, Perplexity pulled a profile for a different business sharing the name. A URL is unambiguous in a way a company name isn’t. For anyone whose brand name is also a common word or a competitor’s, that’s the most directly useful line in this log.
Gemini: no movement at all
Seven citations, five unique pages: the homepage twice, /teams twice, the Growth Series course detail page, and a product-management course category page twice.
Course pages and the teams page. The same corner of the site it retrieved in every run of Log 001.
Handed the URL explicitly, Gemini went back to the catalogue and missed the acquisition again. That is now five consecutive runs across two weeks and two different phrasings, describing an acquired company as independent.
So the URL is not a lever that works on every engine. On this one it appears to change nothing.
ChatGPT and Claude: unchanged positions
ChatGPT cited the homepage, a blog post on product specializations, /learning, and the same Reddit thread that has appeared in every ChatGPT run of this series. No corporate page, no acquisition: consistent with its clean-run behaviour in Log 001, where the acquisition appeared only in the run that reached the founder profile.
Claude reported the acquisition, as it has in every run. Its citations: Tracxn, the homepage, a personal upskilling blog, CB Insights three times, and the Chrome Web Store listing for Reforge Build.
No Miro newsroom. No news page. No about page. Claude has now reported this acquisition in five runs without once citing a page that announces it. CB Insights tracks ownership changes and is the plausible route, but the interface doesn’t say so, so Claude remains the one engine whose mechanism can’t be inspected.
Why the miss happens: the pages don't say it
After running these tests I went and read reforge.com the way an engine would.
Miro appears nowhere in the homepage’s substance. Not in the title tag, which reads Reforge | Product Management Courses for Individuals & Teams. Not in the meta description. Not in the headline, which is about AI rewriting product. Not in any body copy, pricing table, course listing or testimonial.
It appears in three places, all in the footer: a Careers link pointing at miro.com, the Terms and Privacy links pointing at miro.com, and one link labelled Reforge x Miro going to a blog post announcing the deal.
Gemini and ChatGPT aren’t reading badly. The pages they read genuinely don’t carry the fact. Course pages, category pages, the teams page, the homepage: none of them mention the acquisition, because Reforge kept its name (after acquisition) and its product line, so none of them needed rewriting.
The likely reason the whole thing is invisible: nothing changed on the surface. A company that rebrands after an acquisition updates every page automatically, and every engine picks it up. A company that keeps its name updates one blog post, and the news lives or dies on whether an engine happens to find it.
This is the most portable lesson in the log: If your most significant recent fact exists on one page that nothing prominent links to, engines reading your main pages will describe the company you used to be, and they will keep doing it, consistently, for months.
One clear error
Claude stated that Reforge Build launched since the Miro acquisition.
It didn’t. Reforge introduced Build on 12 November 2025, four months before the deal. Miro’s announcement lists Build alongside Insights and Research as products Reforge already had. Perplexity, citing the same Chrome Web Store page, described Build as pre-acquisition and was right.
Reforge’s own announcement post is worth a note. It is still fully indexed by search engines, with its title, date and opening paragraphs intact, but the page itself now returns a 404. The surviving public record of the launch is third-party: a post by Ravi Mehta, one of the product’s creators, published the same day.
The likely mechanism is worth naming. The Chrome Web Store listing says what Build is. It doesn’t say when it shipped. Claude appears to have supplied the timing itself, ordering it against the acquisition it already knew about, and got the sequence backwards.
That’s a specific failure mode: the source establishes existence, the engine infers chronology, and the inference sounds plausible enough that nobody checks.
Two display faults
Claude’s citation list contained two malformed URLs: wwww.reforge.com, with an extra character, and a Chrome Web Store link resolving to an error page.
Neither is an invented source. Both are broken renderings of real ones. But the Build claim- the one that turned out to be wrong- rests on the link that doesn’t open. A reader trying to check it can’t.
Fact-check
- The acquisition was announced on 24 March 2026. Correct in Claude and Perplexity.
- Reforge Build launched on 12 November 2025, before the acquisition. Claude wrong; Perplexity right.
- Balfour’s own statement puts the alumni community above 100,000. Perplexity’s “50,000–100,000+” spans it.
- No engine mentioned Reforge Launch. Class Central reports five AI products shipped in nine months: Build, Insights, Research, Launch and Artifacts.
What this means if you are the brand being asked about
How the question is phrased decides which version of you gets described. Same company, same day, same engine. Asked one way, Perplexity returned a stale funding profile. Asked another, it returned current corporate news. Your prospects use both phrasings and you control neither.
A URL is a disambiguator. If your company name is shared, generic, or close to a competitor’s, name-based queries risk pulling somebody else’s data into your answer. That happened in Log 001 and stopped happening here.
But you cannot rely on it. Gemini ignored the URL entirely and stayed in the product catalogue. Whatever a URL does, it does per engine, and one of the four here did not respond to it at all.
And an engine that can’t reach your news will invent the timeline. Claude knew about the acquisition, knew Build existed, and constructed a relationship between them that isn’t true. Facts that exist in isolation get connected by inference, and the inference is not marked as one.
Limitations
- Perplexity’s search depth may have differed. A notification appeared during this run indicating a Pro model or Pro search was active. Perplexity’s free tier includes a limited allowance of these, and they run a deeper retrieval process than the standard mode. If the Log 001 name-query runs were standard searches and this one was not, then the comparison is between two different retrieval processes as well as two phrasings, and the corpus shift cannot be attributed to the URL alone. The interface does not record which mode ran after the fact.
- One run per engine. Log 001 showed how much a single run can mislead: two findings there did not survive repetition. Three further runs are planned, and the figures here may move.
- Six days separate this from the Log 001 baseline. Perplexity’s shift could be the URL, or an index that changed in the interim. A same-day control on the name query is needed to separate them, and this round doesn’t have one.
- One subject, one industry. A company with a thin site or no database listings would likely behave differently.
- All four engines retrieved. This is a retrieval test throughout, not a measure of unaided recall.
- Publishing is a feedback loop. This log is now itself a page about Reforge, and engines may retrieve it in future runs. The measurement becomes part of what it measures.
What's next for this log
Three further runs per engine, added to this page and dated in the revision history. Alongside them, the original name query re-run on the same day. Comparing the two phrasings a week apart leaves open whether the difference came from the URL or from the week; running both together closes that.
Revision history
13 August 2026 — Published. One run per engine, URL only.
Part of the AI Visibility Logs, an open record of how AI systems find, interpret, and describe brands. How AI Visibility tests are run.
