When a customer asks ChatGPT about your company, the answer is not pulled from your website in real time. It is assembled from what the model absorbed during training - Common Crawl web pages, Wikipedia, news, reviews, Reddit threads, job postings and structured databases like Crunchbase and Wikidata - frozen at a knowledge cutoff months before the model shipped. This story explains where that knowledge comes from, why it drifts stale, how gaps and old narratives creep in, and what companies can actually do to correct the record.
Crunchbase is a San Francisco-based platform that catalogs the private markets - companies, funding rounds, investors and the people behind them - and increasingly tries to predict what will happen next. Born in 2007 as a companion database to TechCrunch, it now serves millions of entrepreneurs, investors and sales teams, layering AI-driven funding and exit predictions on top of a dataset covering more than four million companies, sold through subscriptions, an enterprise API and CRM integrations.