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A prospect asks an AI assistant which firm in your field is worth calling, and the answer gets assembled out of sources. Wikipedia is the one those systems reach for most consistently. Studies of AI citations disagree sharply on how much, with estimates running from a few percent to nearly half of top-cited sources, but every one of them puts Wikipedia at or near the top. Google's Knowledge Graph, the panel beside search results, draws on it as well.

The Co. Letter takes no payment, commission, or anything of value from any company named here.

A page is worth having for a reason that has little to do with what it says. Someone unconnected to you wrote it, you cannot control it, and every reader and every model knows both things. Your website says what you paid for it to say. A Wikipedia article says what independent sources said about you, which is a kind of credibility you cannot buy directly.

You've seen pages for companies smaller than yours, duller than yours, and less careful than yours. Then you looked into getting one and hit a wall. Both things are true, and the explanation is a date.

Wikipedia began rewriting its notability standard for companies in February 2018 and never went back to re-audit what was already there. Its editors say so on the guideline's own talk page: company articles are standing today that would be deleted within hours if you submitted them now. Add a volunteer enforcement system running behind, with one month this year leaving 253 conflict-of-interest requests unanswered, and the picture resolves. Some pages beat the rule. Others have not been noticed. A few are already gone, including more than 200 deleted after a single investigation into paid editing.

None of that helps you, because you would be submitting under today's standard.

Wikipedia will not weigh your sources as a pile. It weighs them one at a time, and each source has to clear four tests at once. The source has to cover your company in depth rather than mention it, be independent of you, be reliable, and be secondary, meaning someone analyzed rather than relayed.

Most business coverage fails at least one. A press release fails independence, and so does an article built from your press release. An interview fails, because the content came from you. A funding announcement, an expansion notice, a product launch, and an award listing are routine and fail depth. Contributor posts on business sites usually fail reliability. Wikipedia's editors have a name for the whole category, which is your echo chamber.

What passes is a reporter with no relationship to you deciding on their own that your company is worth a long piece, and doing it more than once.

If your instinct is that the right firm solves this, it's worth knowing what the firms say. The large communications agencies that committed in 2014 to following Wikipedia's conflict rules submit through the same queue as everyone else, under the same disclosure requirement, and get declined for the same reason. Beutler Ink, the specialist that organized that commitment, tells clients on its own site that when a company is not notable the better approach is to earn independent coverage first, and that it partners with press firms to do it. A reputation firm billing millions a year meets the same gate you do.

Search your company name in Google News. Set aside anything you published, anything repeating your press release, and every interview. Read what is left, and ask each one whether a stranger wrote it about your business at length, on their own initiative.

Three or more, and you have a case worth building. Zero, which is the honest count for most small businesses, and no amount of spending changes it.

Everything that qualifies you for a Wikipedia page is worth having whether the page ever happens.

Three substantial independent features about your business do more for you than the article would. They're what a bank's underwriter finds in diligence. A prospect finds them after the referral and before the call. A good candidate reads them while deciding whether your company is worth leaving a job for. And they're the material AI models pull from when a customer asks who does this work well, which our earlier piece, Make AI Recommend Your Business, covers in detail.

So start where the coverage lives. Trade press for your industry runs on how the work gets done, which you can supply and your competitors will not bother to. Regional business journals cover companies rather than announcements. Reporters on a beat take a pitch about a shift in the industry you can speak to with numbers, and they do not take a pitch about your anniversary.

You still don't write the page. Wikipedia requires anyone connected to a subject to submit through Articles for Creation, where the draft waits in a queue for an unconnected editor to rule on it.

Register a personal account rather than one named for the company, because a company-named account is blockable on sight and shared accounts are prohibited. Disclose before you write a word, on your user page and on the draft's talk page, naming the employer, the client, and the affiliation. If you're paying anyone, including your own marketing employee, the Terms of Use require the same disclosure from them, and editors who skip it are barred from editing.

Then build in the order that works. Assemble the sources first and write only what they support. Owners write the page they want and then hunt for citations, and that draft comes back declined.

Expect to wait. If it comes back declined, revise and resubmit. A rejection is a different result and cannot be resubmitted. Any draft nobody touches for six months is deleted.

Four of these catch people who did everything else right.

Do not paste text from your own website. Owning the words is not the same as licensing them, and a draft built from your site copy gets deleted as a copyright violation unless you file a formal license release with the Wikimedia Foundation first.

Do not have an AI assistant write it. Drafts generated entirely by a model are rejected outright under current rules.

Do not edit from the company network while logged out. It's visible, and it reads as concealment.

Do not add links to your own site across other articles to get in sideways. That's treated as reference spam, it gets reverted, and the edit history follows you into any later review of your draft. Adding real substance to a related article, cited to independent sources rather than your own, is welcome, and a company mentioned inside a broader article can stand when a standalone page would not.

And know the thing nobody selling you a page will say. You do not own the article after it goes up. Anyone can edit it, including the parts you would rather leave out.

The coverage has to exist before the page can, so the first call is to a reporter and not to anyone selling you an article.

The Co. Letter is general information and not legal, financial, or public relations advice for your situation.

Have an interesting business question and need a free bit of advice? Send your question to [email protected]. No confidential info, please!