In today’s AI-dominated digital landscape, your brand is fragmented across platforms, algorithms, user data, and third-party sources.
The result? You don’t control your narrative anymore—unless you actively manage all four dimensions of your digital identity.
In this follow-up session, Myriam Jessier, technical SEO expert and AI search strategist, introduces a powerful model for enterprise marketers: The Brand Control Quadrant.
It’s not just a metaphor. It’s a framework to regain narrative control in the face of AI-driven search, multimodal discovery, and generative content summarization.
Watch the interview
If your current brand management playbook doesn’t include tracking how AI interprets your brand at multiple levels, you’re at risk of misrepresentation and broken trust. Here’s how you can close the gap.
Introducing: the Brand Control Quadrant
Myriam breaks brand representation into four layers:
1. Known brand
Your owned assets. Think logos, slogans, brand guides, press kits. This is where most companies focus, and perhaps overestimate their control. Most teams obsess over their known brand. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
2. Latent brand
The cultural layer: memes, customer stories, tweets, community discourse. It’s emotional, messy, and often invisible to brand managers.
AI models love this layer. It signals relevance and relatability.
3. Shadow brand
Everything your internal systems create—but don’t directly expose: onboarding docs, internal knowledge bases, old slide decks, partner enablement files. If it’s online—even buried—it’s trainable.
LLMs can ingest these. That means outdated or inconsistent materials can actively shape your brand in AI answers.
4. AI-narrated brand
How platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity describe your brand to users. It’s the synthesis of all three previous layers, served up as “truth.”
And this is where narrative risk becomes real. Outcomes can range from:
- Inaccurate summaries
- Outdated messaging
- Competitor brand spillover
- Tone mismatches or hallucinated claims
AI doesn’t just surface your content but interprets it. So, your brand is essentially being reassembled by machines and you need to feed them what you want them to see.
If you’re not managing all four quadrants, your brand narrative:
- Becomes distorted
- Gets overwritten by third-party interpretations
- Loses alignment with internal positioning and customer expectations
How to audit your brand in the AI era
Myriam recommends a recurring brand control audit using the quadrant, as each part has unique considerations that feed your overall narrative.
Known brand:
- Is your structured data clean and crawlable?
- Are your brand assets available, up-to-date, and referenced in trusted third-party sources?
Latent brand:
- What’s being said about you on community platforms like Reddit, G2, Glassdoor?
- Are brand advocates (or critics) shaping public perception more than your team?
Shadow brand:
- What public files or unlisted assets could LLMs crawl?
- Is your legacy messaging leaving a digital trace that misaligns with current strategy?
AI-narrated brand:
- What happens when you ask ChatGPT, “What is [your company]?”
- Are your responses accurate, differentiated, and favorable?
An AI-aware strategy lets you reclaim control
To manage all four quadrants, Myriam encourages enterprise teams to:
Create machine-readable brand narratives using structured content, citations, and schema across all your core content. Then it’s a matter of monitoring LLM answers and SERP summaries for brand accuracy, you need
Lastly, it’s crucial to build partnerships with high-authority sources that feed both search results and training data (e.g. ).
Key takeaways
- Your brand lives across four layers: Known, Latent, Shadow, and AI-Narrated.
- AI models synthesize these layers to build what users see—and believe.
- You must audit all layers, identify misalignments, and feed the systems better data.
- The Brand Control Quadrant gives enterprise teams a practical way to see and steer their narrative in real time.
The Brand Control Quadrant reveals the full complexity of managing brand perception in the AI age—from structured assets (Known Brand) to algorithmically generated answers (AI-Narrated Brand).
To manage this, you need more than dashboards, you need orchestration. That’s what Semrush Enterprise and AI Optimization (AIO) deliver.
- AIO gives you visibility: how your brand appears in search, what’s being said in social, what AI is inferring from shadow assets, and how you’re represented in zero-click summaries.
- It helps you align structured data, third-party mentions, and internal resources, to turn fragmented impressions into a unified narrative.
- It identifies brand inconsistencies, highlights emerging risks, and measures your AI presence in real time, so you can act before misperceptions take hold.
Semrush Enterprise doesn’t just provide tools. With AIO, it becomes your strategic system for narrative control, visibility management, and AI-era brand authority.
Because in this new reality, brand isn’t just what you say. It’s also what AI says. And AIO helps you unite and lead both stories.
