How do you manage reputation when AI tools recommend competitors over you?

If AI tools are recommending competitors in the prompts that matter to the brand, the diagnosis runs through source attribution. AIQ™ shows which sources the engines are citing for those recommendations, which tells the program whether the gap is a directory listing, a comparison article, a ranking guide inclusion, a Wikipedia paragraph, or an entity-infrastructure problem (the brand simply isn’t recognized as a comparable peer). From there the work is concrete. Strengthen the brand’s presence in the directories and ranking guides the engines are weighting. Generate authoritative comparison content that gives the engines new material to read where the existing content is dated or one-sided. Build the entity infrastructure (Wikidata, schema, Knowledge Panel) that makes the brand visible as a peer when the engines decide which firms to name. Coordinate with PR on placements that the engines actually weight. The pattern is reliable when the source diagnosis is correct; arguing with the engines about their recommendations is not.