Online Reputation in the Age of AI

TL;DR: Online reputation – and investing time and resources into optimizing it – is more important than ever. In this article we’ll tell you how to monitor your brand’s reputation and share strategies for improving and maintaining it.

In the past, worrying about your brand’s online reputation meant considering what consumers were asking about your brand and where they were finding those answers. You could lean heavily on the way you presented the brand on your own website and the presence of positive product reviews on the site. Maybe you kept your eye on your review stars in Google, but in the old days, even bad reviews could lead to good rankings.

In the age of AI, you need to rethink this mindset. Online reputation is more important than ever, and it requires a shift in strategy if you hope to be cited and recommended by answer engines and AI assistants. LLMs have access to vast amounts of data and can source information about your brand from virtually anywhere. And don’t forget that public review ecosystems are dominated by the loudest voices: the people who are very happy or extremely unhappy.

AI engines are designed to present a balanced picture … which sounds reassuring until you realize that “balance” means they will actively seek out negative signals even when positive ones dominate. When negative signals are thin, the model goes fishing deeper and deeper into third-party sources, directories, and review sites that would never surface in a normal search. A single bad review, echoed across multiple sites, can carry disproportionate weight simply because it satisfies the model’s drive toward balance. This means that they often rely on third-party sources more heavily than brand-owned sites. Unfortunately, the story you tell on your website is only one information source influencing how your brand will appear in chat. That means that it’s important to pay attention to perception of your company across a range of sources.

Why Does Online Reputation Matter So Much?

More and more, your customers and potential customers are beginning their product discovery in answer engines. If your brand doesn’t appear in AI answers, you risk being outside the consideration set and missing out on conversions. If your brand does appear in those answers, you need to know how the LLMs are talking about you. Marketers are increasingly tracking “share of model voice,” which is how often and how favorably your brand appears in LLM citations compared to competitors. It’s becoming as strategically important as traditional share of voice in search.

The Trustpilot Phenomenon

You’ve probably heard a lot about Trustpilot lately. The third-party review site has existed for almost 19 years, hosts hundreds of millions of reviews, and is generally regarded as an independent source of genuine reviews. This makes the site an ideal data source for LLMs. In March, Trustpilot reported that its annual profit more than quadrupled, largely due to its importance for answer engines and the surge of click-throughs to its site. It’s important not to ignore Trustpilot or the overall sentiment of your brand that it communicates.

But Trustpilot is not by any means the only site LLMs are drawing from. For B2B brands, platforms like G2 and Capterra serve a similar role. Another site that has grown in importance is Reddit. Already notable for its strong presence in Google search results before its 2024 AI content deal with Google, Reddit is considered by most models to be an authentic source of unfiltered questions, answers, and opinions. It’s also another massive trove of data from human users.

Wikipedia and YouTube are two other sites regularly utilized in AI answers, while Yelp remains a significant source for local and service businesses. Google’s Knowledge Graph – which defines how Google understands your brand as an entity – also influences how AI surfaces describe you, making consistency across your website, schema markup, and third-party profiles especially important.

And don’t overlook unlinked brand mentions across the web: LLMs pick up on how your brand is discussed in context, not just where it’s formally reviewed. It’s critical to broaden your thinking about the contributors to your brand’s online presence.

What You Can Do

It can feel overwhelming to monitor and manage your brand’s online reputation in 2026. But we’ll break down the steps to assessing and protecting it.

Your Rosetta Stone: AI Sentiment Analysis Helps You Assess Your Reputation

First, perform an AI sentiment analysis. Directly ask several top LLMs how they perceive your brand and where they’re sourcing their information. Additionally, ask each model real questions a consumer might ask, such as “what’s the best [your top product]?” Track how often you are mentioned in these “real user” questions, how visible you are vs. your competitors, and what the overall sentiment is.

There can be a great variety in the perception of your brand from LLM to LLM. Depending on its source material, the sentiment portrayed by ChatGPT may be different from what you see in the output from Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude. If your brand appears in Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode results, check those as well, as they draw on different signals than conversational LLMs and represent a distinct surface where brand perception is formed.

It hardly needs to be said that in the world of AI, things change quickly. Models are constantly being improved and updated, and the sources they rely on can shift with those updates. That’s why it’s important to query multiple sources and refresh your AI sentiment analysis at least once a quarter.

How to Improve Your Online Reputation: More Positive Reviews

Once you know the most significant sources of information about your company, you can devise strategy to improve your brand’s presence and standing in those source locations.

More quality reviews mean you’re more likely to appear – and positively – in AI results. Evaluate your review solicitation strategy and make optimizations. First, expand your strategy to cover the most important sources of brand reputation. Don’t direct all review traffic to leave ratings on your own website; diversify and send some of that traffic to Trustpilot, Google, Yelp, and other frequently cited sources. Make submitting a review easy: provide a direct link to your company’s page on the review platform so you aren’t unintentionally introducing friction into the review process.

Ensure you’re asking for reviews at the right time in the customer lifecycle. It depends on your product mix, but customers are more likely to have strong feelings and be inspired to leave a review soon after experiencing your product. For clothing, for example, that may be just a few days after delivery, but for sporting equipment you might need to wait longer to ensure your customer has had time to test your products on the field, track, or lake.

A very important caveat: DO NOT incentivize only positive reviews. It violates platform policies on most reputable sites including Trustpilot, is a negative trust signal for AI, and can even violate FTC rules.

How to Improve Your Online Reputation: Empathetic Response to Negative Reviews

You should respond to all reviews; responses from the brand are a trust signal for AI. But most important is your handling of negative reviews. You can counteract the impact of a negative review on your reputation by responding with empathy and a focus on making things right. A study found 56% of consumers have changed their opinion about a business after seeing how they responded to a review, and LLMs can understand this nuance as well.

You can also minimize the number of new negative reviews you receive by making it easy for a customer to reach out to your own customer service team, rather than heading directly to a review site and leaving an angry rant. Make contact information easy to find on your site, and train your customer service representatives to communicate with understanding and clear information.

If your team has bandwidth, try contacting individual customers who left bad reviews but then had their complaints handled successfully (this is easier if your team quickly and kindly responded to the initial reviews). Ask them to consider updating their reviews based on how you handled their complaint. Do not offer an incentive for this update!

How to Improve Your Online Reputation: Build Community

Another thing you can do to positively impact online reputation is to build community among your customers. Create an emotional connection with your customers from first touchpoint, to product delivery, to becoming your champion with consistent, authentic messaging and flawless customer service. A strong loyalty program also builds connection with customers and keeps them coming back. This kind of community is especially important for Reddit, where customers will recommend you – or jump in to defend you – if they are fervently loyal to your brand.

Online reputation management in the age of AI is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing commitment to showing up authentically across every platform where your customers and the models they rely on are paying attention. The brands that invest in it now will have a significant advantage over those who wait until they have a problem to solve.

Need Expert Support?

At ROI Revolution, we’ve helped clients improve their brand reputation with comprehensive strategy and hands-on support. Book a call to learn how we can support you in assessing and optimizing your online reputation to grow your business by retaining loyal customers and acquiring net new ones who will be your future champions.