The brand equity problem with uncontrolled schema

Right now, most brands have their semantic layer defined by others:

Google's Knowledge Graph interprets them Wikipedia editors describe them

Review platforms categorise them

LLMs synthesise from all of the above

The brand has no authoritative, machine-readable declaration of what they say they are. They're being described, not describing themselves. In a world where AI agents are the first point of contact, before a human ever sees a webpage, that's a catastrophic loss of narrative control.

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The data catalog dimension -

When a brand builds its own schema, it's doing something MDM-adjacent that nobody has named clearly yet: it's creating an external-facing data catalog, its canonical index of what the brand produces, means, offers, and relates to. A common semantic layer.

Internal data catalogs (DataHub, Amundsen, Unity Catalog) govern the inward-facing version of this.

But there is no equivalent discipline for the outward-facing semantic footprint. That gap is largely unoccupied, brands have enormous incentive to fill it.

Have you a strategy to own your digital footprint, to build a digital catalog for AI to discover, discuss and transact with your brand with data you control?.

When you control the data, you control the narrative for AI. Where are you on this journey?

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