Last week, while doing our routine check of fixed queries, I casually searched for our own company name “Siwenlide” on Toutiao Search. The top four results on page one were all reports about a stand-up comedian — her name is Siwen. We came in fifth.
(I searched again before publishing: today the top three are a few short videos we posted years ago, and the reports about the comedian have dropped down. Search results change every day, but the name collision doesn’t — any day she gets one more news story, and we slide down again.)
This isn’t an isolated case. Any company whose name contains a common two- or three-character combination can end up colliding with a celebrity, a place name, or an everyday word. Colliding isn’t just a matter of losing face — it means that when search engines and AI work out “who the user is actually searching for,” they will rank you lower.
Why you get pushed down
When a search engine assigns results to a term, it looks at “what most people searching that term want.” The vast majority of people searching “Siwen” want stand-up comedy, so the main meaning of those two characters got fixed as that comedian. The first two characters of our name overlap with hers, and the last two, “Lide,” aren’t a common word, so it’s easy for a machine to split “Siwenlide” into “Siwen + Lide” and then interpret it as “Siwen.”
AI assistants are a little better off. We asked “How is Beijing Siwen Lide Technology & Trade Co., Ltd.?” and it answered accurately, because we gave the full name — it appears in the business registration records, so there’s no ambiguity. But if a user just says “Siwenlide,” the AI searches first, and with the results dominated by the comedian, the material it pulls in gets mixed with irrelevant content.
Self-check: who is your company name colliding with
| Search for | What to look at |
|---|---|
| Your company’s short name (what’s left after you strip out “Beijing,” “Technology” and “Co., Ltd.”) | How many of the top five results are you? Whose are the ones that aren’t? |
| The first two characters of the short name | If those two characters are themselves a person’s name, a place name or a common word, your short name will most likely be split that way |
| Short name + your industry term (for example, “Siwenlide IT”) | Is this combination yours alone? This is the “brand term” you should be pushing |
| Full name | The full name is usually unambiguous, but nobody searches for it. It’s there for AI to verify, not for customers to search |
Five things you can do, ordered by how fast they work
- Use “short name + industry term” consistently in everything public. Don’t write “Siwenlide” — write “Siwenlide IT Services” or “Beijing Siwenlide.” Business cards, WeChat Official Account name, store names on third-party platforms, press release bylines — all the same. This combined term is yours alone, and within a few months the search engine will learn to associate it with you.
- Every page title on your website should carry your industry term. No page should have a title that is just the company name or a catch-all like “Products & Services” or “Contact Us.” At the end of August we went through every title on our site; the homepage now reads “Beijing IT Operations Company_Beijing IT Operations Outsourcing – Siwenlide,” with the company name last and the industry term first.
- Put the full name, short name and aliases into your structured data. A page can carry a machine-only block of company information listing “Beijing Siwen Lide Technology & Trade Co., Ltd.,” “Siwenlide” and “Siwenlide IT” at the same time, telling the machine that these three are the same company. Customers can’t see this block, but AI reads it.
- Change your name on third-party platforms to include the industry term. If a store name on a directory, map or job site is just the short name, you are effectively adding traffic to the comedian’s term. Change it to “Siwenlide IT Operations Outsourcing.”
- Accept one fact: you won’t get the bare short name back. The comedian’s search volume is several orders of magnitude larger than that of a company with a few dozen staff — there’s no point spending money to fight for it. Put your effort into the combined terms; if a customer searching “Siwenlide IT” or “Siwenlide operations” sees you as the first result, that’s enough.
A mirror-image example
Some companies have names so distinctive that nobody collides with them. These companies are actually prone to a different mistake: thinking the name is special enough, they put only the name in their website titles. The result is that a search for the company name finds them, but a search for “Beijing IT operations company” never does, because no page speaks to that industry term. Companies with distinctive names need to add the industry term to their titles even more; companies with colliding names use the industry term to separate themselves from everyone else. The solution is the same in both cases: the company name should always appear alongside what you do.
What we did this week
- The aliases in our website’s structured data now include the full name, the short name and “Siwenlide IT.”
- Our WeChat Official Account name is “Siwenlide IT Services,” not “Siwenlide.”
- All new articles are signed “Beijing Siwenlide.”
- The name on the third-party directory hasn’t been changed yet; we have sent two emails to that platform requesting a correction, and there has still been no reply. This one isn’t in our hands.
Next month we’ll search “Siwenlide IT” again to see whether the combined term has pushed us to the first result. We’ll write the outcome up in this series.
We are Beijing Siwenlide, based in Shunyi, with 14 years focused on enterprise IT services and more than 1,000 enterprise clients served to date. This series is about the pitfalls we have hit ourselves along the way. If you would like to talk about your company’s situation, take a look at About Us, or just call 400-686-2011.
