When someone asks an AI who's running, what does it say?
You can't control what an assistant says about your race. You can control whether your site is reachable, readable, and specific enough to be used as a source — and that is a week of ordinary technical work, not a service you need to buy.
The short version: a growing share of voters research a race by asking an assistant instead of scrolling a results page, and for down-ballot races the answer is often thin, dated, or about someone else entirely. You cannot control what any of these systems say. You can control whether your site is reachable, readable, and specific enough to be usable as a source — and that is ordinary technical work you can finish this week, not a service you need to buy.
Run the search yourself first
Before changing anything, spend twenty minutes finding out what the problem actually is. Open two or three assistants and ask the questions a real voter would ask, in the words a real voter would use:
- Who is running for [your office] in [your city or district]?
- Who is [your name]?
- What does [your name] think about [the top local issue]?
- When is the [your city] school board election and who is on the ballot?
Write down three things for each answer: whether you appear at all, whether what it says is accurate, and — most useful — what it cites. The citations tell you which sources the answer was built from, and that is the part you can do something about.
Most down-ballot campaigns find one of four results. You're absent entirely. You're present but described from an old article about a previous race. You're confused with someone who shares your name. Or the answer is fine, and cites your own site — which tells you what right looks like.
Why the answer is thin for a local race
The mechanism is less mysterious than it sounds. These systems answer well when a fact is stated consistently across several independent sources they can reach, and badly when it isn't. A Senate race has wire coverage, Ballotpedia entries, debate transcripts, and a decade of archived material. A school board race in a mid-sized county might have a county elections PDF, one local news story behind a paywall, and your website — and if your website is hard to read, that leaves the PDF.
That scarcity is also the opportunity. In a race with almost no corpus, one clear, crawlable, specific site is a disproportionate share of everything there is to find. Down-ballot campaigns are competing for that with far less effort than a statewide campaign would need.
Four things that make a site usable as a source
1. Check that you're not blocking the crawlers
Some site builders and security products block AI crawlers by default, and a campaign can be invisible to an assistant for no reason other than a setting nobody chose. Look at yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see Disallow lines aimed at GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended, that is a decision being made for you. Blocking them is a legitimate choice for some organizations; for a campaign that wants to be found and quoted, it's usually backwards.
2. Make sure your content exists without JavaScript
Plenty of modern site builders render text in the browser rather than sending it in the page. A crawler that doesn't run JavaScript then receives an empty shell — and several do not.
The test takes ten seconds and needs no tools. Open your homepage, view source, and search that source for your own name and your office. If you can't find them in the raw HTML, neither can anything else that isn't a full browser.
3. Say who you are, in plain sentences, in one place
Assistants work from text, not from design. A hero image with your name in the artwork, a tagline of pure vibes, and a bio that opens with "for over two decades, our community has faced a choice" gives them nothing to attach to.
Put the identifying facts in adjacent plain text, near the top: full name as it appears on the ballot, office sought, district or jurisdiction, party or nonpartisan status, election date. Then two or three specific positions written as claims rather than values — the sentence "I voted against the 2025 rezoning and would vote against it again" is usable in a way that "I believe in smart growth" is not.
Do the same on your about page in a short opening paragraph. Our guide to getting found in search covers the conventional search side of the same setup.
4. Get the same facts stated somewhere that isn't your website
Self-description carries less weight than corroboration, and this is where most campaigns underinvest. The things that help are unglamorous: a complete Ballotpedia profile, accurate candidate filings with your state or the FEC, a local news mention that names you and the office, endorsement pages on the endorsers' own sites, and a candidate questionnaire published by a civic group.
Each is a source that says the same thing your site says, in a place an assistant can reach independently. Three of those matter more than another month of homepage tinkering.
When the answer is wrong about you
There is no correction form. You cannot file a fix with a model the way you can ask a newspaper for a retraction, and nobody at these companies is going to hand-edit an answer about a county commission race. What you can do is change the material the answer is built from, and wait.
For the two common failures, that means different work. If you're being confused with someone who shares your name, the fix is distinguishing context repeated consistently: the same form of your name everywhere — including the middle initial if you use one — always near your office, your jurisdiction, and the year. Vary how you write your own name across your site, your filings, and your press release and you have made the disambiguation problem harder for everything downstream.
If you're being described from a stale race or an old job, the fix is upstream. Update your Ballotpedia profile. Ask the outlet that ran the outdated piece whether they'll add a line noting the current race. Make sure your filings show the office you're actually seeking. Then give it time — answers change as their sources change, which is also why this is worth rechecking monthly rather than once.
What we do on this site, and what we won't claim
Electbase.com is built to be quoted, and you can check every part of it. Our robots.txt names the major AI crawlers and welcomes them explicitly. We publish an llms.txt — a plain-text summary of what this company is and what it sells — which is an emerging convention rather than a guaranteed input, and we treat it as such. Every page is static HTML that needs no JavaScript to read, carries structured data, and states plainly what Electbase is in the first paragraph.
What we won't tell you is that any of this makes an assistant mention you. Nobody outside those companies can see how their systems select and cite sources, the systems change without notice, and there is no ranking to check. Anyone selling guaranteed AI visibility, a "ChatGPT ranking," or a monthly retainer to submit your site to AI engines is selling something that does not exist. The honest version of this work is the same technical hygiene that has always made a site legible — done deliberately, and checked.
What your Electbase site already does
If your site is on Electbase, most of the mechanical half is handled at publish time. Your pages are baked as static HTML, so the text is in the page rather than assembled in the browser. Publishing writes a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt that allows crawlers, sets a canonical URL, and generates the social preview tags that determine how your links look when shared. Every publish also pings IndexNow, which notifies Bing and Yandex directly that your site changed. And an accessibility check runs at publish — a page that fails cannot go live — which matters here because the markup that helps a screen reader parse a page is largely the markup that helps a crawler parse it too.
One thing it doesn't do automatically today: campaign sites don't emit schema.org structured data. If you want it, it's hand-added markup for now.
The parts nobody can automate are the ones above — the plain sentences about who you are, and the corroboration off your own site.
The Discoverability Program starts with a free audit of what search engines and assistants currently say about your race. Start your site →
The discoverability checklist
- Asked three assistants about your race and written down what each cited
- Checked robots.txt for blocks on AI crawlers you didn't choose
- Found your own name and office in the raw HTML of your homepage
- Ballot name, office, district, party status and election date in adjacent plain text near the top
- Two or three positions written as specific claims rather than values statements
- A complete Ballotpedia profile
- Candidate filings accurate with your state or the FEC
- At least one local news mention naming you and the office
- Endorsements listed on the endorsers' own sites, not only yours
- The whole check repeated once a month — the answers change