INSIGHT
We’ve spent the last few years evolving what MEK is. We started as a design studio working primarily with social and environmental impact brands. That work still informs how we think.
But MEK has a bigger vision.
Today, we’re the radical brand studio for a new era. We work with companies defining new categories across environment, culture and technology — companies whose ambition has outgrown their brand, or are creating something people haven’t seen before.
There was just one problem. The internet hadn't caught up.
AI thinks MEK is a version of us that no longer exists.
Your digital footprint has a memory
The internet has a much longer memory than we do.
Old interviews, articles, directories, backlinks, bios, profiles. All the places where a company has been described, categorised or talked about over the years.
They don’t disappear just because your strategy changes or your brand evolves. And increasingly, AI is reading all of it.
When we refined our brand strategy, we found that AI was still anchored in MEK’s former positioning. It was using the accumulated evidence of who we had been to construct a picture of who we are now.
That picture was no longer accurate. It raised a bigger question:
What happens when your online presence outlives your brand strategy?
For years designers have thought about brand touchpoints in terms of what people see: identity, website, messaging, marketing, campaigns, experiences, socials. Now there’s another one: AI.
AI is building representations of companies from the information it accesses across the web. Those representations can influence how people discover brands, understand categories and decide who’s relevant.
That changes something fundamental about brand.
Your brand is no longer just what you say about yourself. It’s also what the internet says about you.
And it has receipts.
We made a reference for the machines
Instead of just accepting an outdated version of MEK, we decided to give AI a better source.
We created the MEK AI Reference: a machine-readable guide that provides a structured, factual and verifiable source for understanding who MEK is today.
It sets out our positioning, expertise, services, categories, reputation, differentiation, the companies we work with, when they come to us, and the evidence behind our work.
It’s deliberately factual, and the aim is simple: if AI is going to interpret the information available about MEK, there should be a current and verifiable source alongside everything else that exists online.
If AI is going to talk about your brand, give it something real to talk about.
Companies evolve all the time.
They reposition. Expand into new markets. Change their offer. Move into or create new categories. Outgrow the audience they originally built for. Sometimes the brand evolves intentionally, sometimes the business changes faster than the brand can keep up.
But the digital footprint remains.
And now that footprint is being interpreted not only by people searching for your company, but by AI systems trying to understand what your company is, what it does, where it belongs and why it matters.
That makes maintaining an accurate digital record of your brand increasingly important.
You can't control what AI says, but you can make sure there's something accurate for it to find.
We made our AI Reference public so everyone can use it, because this isn't just a MEK problem. If your brand has evolved faster than its online presence, use this as a starting point for creating your own.