If you haven’t searched yourself in a generative AI platform yet, you’re in the dark about your online reputation. The way people search is changing, and it’s reshaping your reputation with your target audiences.
As a leader, your reputation directly impacts your company’s valuation, investor confidence, employee engagement and brand trust. While you can’t pay to control what AI says about you, there are strategies to shape your online reputation and narrative.
Reputation management
The idea of a leader’s reputation being tied to the company’s brand isn’t anything new. Most studies show that a CEO’s influence contributes to about half of the company’s performance. But the way it’s being shaped is changing. Consumers have very little legwork to do. They type a question into an AI chatbot, and the bot does all the interpretation. Depending on the question that’s asked, the person’s chat history and what’s out there about you, AI is making its own interpretation of you as an executive, and the person searching can learn all they need to know without ever clicking a link.
So what can you do? A strategic approach to making sure you show up the way you want to involves a few things:
- Earned media: Third-party credibility goes a long way. AI values it the same way consumers do. Earned media accounts for 89% of citations, with non-paid content outpacing paid content by a significant margin.
- Thought leadership: Blogs, articles and opinion pieces are important to shape your message and build your reputation. A recent study shows CEO thought leadership can drive more than $300 million in shareholder value in just one week.
- Social media: LinkedIn is the second-most cited platform across ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity. An executive has to have an authentic social media presence to complement the brand’s messaging.
- Press releases: While we’ve seen a decline in the overall impact of press releases, they are still valuable in certain circumstances and are regularly cited in AI searches.
- Awards: AI views awards the same way as non-paid search results, boosting your credibility and overall reputation.
Consistent messaging
While these pieces are all important, they won’t work without consistent messaging. If AI sees contradictions, it will rule you out as a credible source. This could be as simple as not having an updated title on LinkedIn, which is contradictory to your business’s website.
Reputation management is an essential part of any marketing strategy in today’s world. It requires an investment to do it well and to ensure your strategy changes as often as AI search rankings.
Where to start
An audit will give you a baseline of what AI is saying about you and where you need to improve. As part of our Executive Reputation service, we have a proprietary process analyzing results from several AI search engines to evaluate your key messages, current visibility and identify gaps and opportunities. With a letter grade as your baseline, regular audits will show the progress made by strategic, AI-focused reputation management.
An external firm can do this in ways your internal team can’t. An internal communication team represents the brand’s voice and key messages. It is critical the brand and the executive’s voice, expertise and perspectives are different – aligned, but different. Remember, people want to connect with people, and if you’re not showing up authentically online, consumers won’t want to work with or buy from you.
AI search engines are constantly changing what they cite, making it difficult to keep up. One size does not fit all from CEO to CEO or even for executives within one organization. But controlling your reputation gives you strategic freedom, and having a partner on the forefront of AI search optimization will ensure that what shows up accurately reflects you and your organization.