People use “verified” for four different jobs. Mixing them is how owners buy the wrong product.
A government registry records that a legal entity exists. Sunbiz, Companies House, CIPC, and similar offices issue that record. AI Verified does not issue it.
A KYB check is what a bank or a payment processor runs before it opens an account. Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and Moody’s sell data into that job. That is credit and compliance. It is not a page a customer’s answer engine opens.
A review directory collects ratings and listings. Yelp, Angi, and Google Business Profile are large structured corpora. Engines cite them because the data is crawlable and old. Some of those products also sell promotion inside their own results. The database and the upsell are different layers.
A public identity file is a dated third-party record of who the firm is: legal name, website the owner controls, city or service area, phone, and any official number the owner attached from a live official page. That is the job AI Verified sells at $297 a year for Gold.
First-party is still useful. It is not third-party.
Organization schema and llms.txt on the company domain tell a crawler what the company says about itself. They are not third-party verification. Google Search Central has also said AI Overviews do not require a special AI file. Eligibility is ordinary indexing and snippet eligibility.
A review directory is a list. A public identity file is a record.
What is business identity verification · KYB and public identity · Directory row vs identity file · llms.txt and verification