With the introduction of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini, AI is becoming an important tool for building and maintaining a brand’s reputation online. Here’s everything PR professionals need to know about AI reputation management.
- What Is AI Reputation Management?
- How Does AI Impact Brand Reputation?
- Benefits of Using AI in Brand Reputation Management
- Challenges of Using AI in Brand Reputation Management
- Uses of AI in Brand Reputation Management
What Is AI Reputation Management?
AI reputation management uses artificial intelligence to monitor, analyze and influence a brand’s perception online. It reviews public sentiment from vast datasets like ratings and online conversations across all channels, as well as automates repetitive tasks — like collecting reviews and responding to feedback or questions — that traditionally relied on humans. With AI reputation management, your PR team can more proactively identify trends and deescalate emerging threats to shape audience perception faster and more efficiently.
How Does AI Impact Brand Reputation?
AI can control the first impression of your brand. When people research your company, AI now plays a decisive role in shaping what consumers learn about your business — even without visiting your website or seeing own-brand content.
Today, search engines deliver answers through AI summaries, featured snippets and zero-click results for more than half of all queries on Google. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Claude aggregate information from across the internet to answer brand-related questions. Recommendation systems curate what content surfaces in social feeds. In all cases, AI — not you — decides what information about your brand reaches consumers first.
And the risk of misinformation about your business is real. AI tools can inadvertently amplify inaccurate details about your brand. If an AI system pulls from unreliable sources or misinterprets context, it may spread wrong information to consumers quickly and damage the public’s perception of you.
fThough we can’t control AI systems directly, we as PR professionals can influence what they learn. Strong media coverage, authoritative content and other earned media help your brand appear in AI search accurately. The goal shouldn’t be to manage AI, but to manage the information ecosystem that AI draws from so that your brand reputation remains positive.
Benefits of Using AI in Brand Reputation Management
When used with proper human oversight, here are ways AI can help a brand with online reputation management.
- Faster Processing: AI can scan and process vast amounts of data — including reviews, social media posts, forums and more—in real time, allowing brands to detect shifts in public sentiment more quickly.
- Improved Accuracy: With well-trained sentiment models, AI is able to identify tone and brand mentions with high precision. It can flag patterns of subtle negativity or misinformation that might otherwise go unnoticed, allowing communication teams to respond with greater accuracy.
- Better Scalability: Reputation monitoring becomes increasingly complex as your business grows. AI systems can analyze multilingual data, manage feedback across multiple locations and aggregate insights from dozens of digital platforms — all without requiring large-scale manual labor.
- More Proactive: Through predictive analytics, AI can analyze historical data patterns in customer feedback, ratings and perception to detect early warning signs of potential issues. This allows brands to act preventatively instead of reactively.
- Constant Surveillance: AI-powered monitoring tools run continuously, flagging sudden spikes in mentions, sentiment changes or negative keywords. This 24/7 reporting prevents major reputation threats from going unnoticed, even outside of business hours.
Challenges of Using AI in Brand Reputation Management
These are a few challenges PR firms may run into during AI reputation management and what you can do to lessen or overcome them.
- Misinformation & AI Hallucinations: AI tools sometimes generate inaccurate summaries, misinterpret context or even hallucinate false information, which can lead to a distortion of brand messaging. To avoid this, consistently audit your client’s online info so you can correct misinformation and train AI systems with reputable, verified data. And always have a human review AI responses for accuracy.
- Lacks Human Tone & Originality: AI may produce responses that come across as impersonal, generic or emotionless, which can damage brand authenticity and audience connection. Frequently check automated responses for proper tone and keep direct communication human-centered when possible. Have humans handle final approval of everything before it goes live.
- Over-Reliance on Automation: Automation can significantly improve a brand’s response time, but relying on it too heavily — especially for delicate or complex issues — can lead to insensitive or incomplete messaging. Use AI for speed and scale, but rely on human teams for important judgment calls and sensitive situations.
- Poor Understanding: Because AI sometimes struggles to interpret nuances like sarcasm, emotion or context, this can result in biased or misleading insights about your client’s brand perception. Keep both human data and communication specialists on hand to confirm results.
- Privacy & Data Concerns: Because AI reputation monitoring tools rely on customer data and user-generated content, they can also introduce privacy or security risks — which can damage brand trust if managed improperly. Comply with laws and regulations, create your own data governance policy and be transparent with your clients and their customers about how their data is being collected and used.
Uses of AI in Brand Reputation Management
From monitoring to content creation, public relations specialists should be using AI to help with these aspects of brand reputation management to save time, effort and cost.
Online Review Management
There are plenty of benefits to responding to customer reviews, and in most cases, faster is better. AI tools can help your PR or marketing agency flag reviews for clients that need immediate human attention, as well as by generating automatic responses that address concerns in negative reviews or show gratitude for positive reviews.
Content Creation & SEO
AI can be used to generate keyword-optimized content, thought leadership pieces, AI-friendly news releases and key messaging for media interviews — all to improve visibility and create a positive perception of your brand. PR teams can also use AI for SEO titles, meta descriptions and other structured data at faster rates and higher volumes than humans can do alone. These optimizations make it easier for AI to parse, understand and cite your brand in AI results.
Online Reputation Monitoring
AI can consistently monitor brand mentions online through reviews, social media and other channels to conduct sentiment analysis, taking all feedback and identifying it as positive, negative or neutral. It can even summarize reasons behind feedback and succinctly deliver real-time reports so you and your clients know what to address. This is often more efficient than manual monitoring, allowing your team to stay on top of brand sentiment across multiple platforms seamlessly so human efforts can be focused on tasks like strategic decision-making and authentic interactions with clients and their customers.
Automated Responses
AI chatbots are a great way to address customer concerns and provide immediate assistance — or determine if and when an issue should be escalated to a person. An AI chatbot can be installed directly on your client’s website, and after you program its knowledge base, it’ll respond 24/7 to questions and concerns, helping your team address them more efficiently.
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