AI disruption isn’t coming—it’s here. Communicators who fail to adapt risk losing their audience’s attention.
Brian Snyder is Axicom Chief Innovation Officer and Advisor at the Center for AI Strategy.
The work that goes into understanding what’s happening in the landscape today is a big part of my job. And critical to that is protecting and strengthening a brand’s AI reputation.
We talk a lot about how AI changes our work internally as communicators, but less about how it’s transforming the audience behavior. We’re moving from audiences consuming the coverage, content and conversations that we generate as communicators to trusting AI’s answers instead. Your customers and stakeholders are increasingly relying on AI answer engines, and soon they will depend on agents, where AI leaves the chat box and becomes more ambient and proactive.
This means that we’re progressing from buying clicks and traffic to earning AI’s endorsement. With zero-click search, brand reputation is earned when AI recommends, mentions, cites and advocates for your brand.
As a result, a clear separation of marketing and communications is shifting to shared accountability. We’ve got to transition from campaigns and moments to always-on storytelling, and from measuring outputs to measuring reputation outcomes.
So instead of optimizing for the social feed, as we’ve been doing for the last 15 years or so, we need to optimize for the AI answer. And where does that answer come from? Earned media, third-party experts, social communities, Wikipedia, and brand sites. That’s because AI reputation cannot be bought – it must be earned. And that’s where the role of the communicator is not just to run AI reputation management, GEO, or AIEO, but to put it into action.
This is a three-step process:
1. Know how your brand is represented in AI – monitor
2. Understand what media drives AI answers about your brand – analyze
3. Align your earned, owned and social media strategy to double down on the things that are working and close the gaps for things that aren’t – act
I want to leave you with an actionable tip, which is what to look for in a GEO tool or service. Everybody is going to be trying to sell you from every possible angle, but these are the four necessities I suggest that you look for.
a. Real user experience insights. A lot of tools use the APIs for GPT, Gemini, or Claude, but you need to capture what consumers actually see in AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot. To do that, you need a tool that will conduct browser automation.
b. Demand-side insights. It’s not enough to know just what the AI outputs; you need to know what people are asking, and not every tool has that ability.
c. Regional and language testing. Make sure that you can run the same query across the globe, so that you can see how the answers differ across geographies and languages.
d. Customizable queries. Confirm that you can seed your own questions so you can tailor your monitoring to your brand’s reputation levers and your industry’s context.
More resources are available to members of the Center for AI Strategy.
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