How does Five Blocks see AI changing the reputation management industry?

The shift is structural rather than incremental. For two decades, reputation work was fundamentally about influencing what Google returned for a query: ranking, SERP (the Google results page) composition, Knowledge Panel content. AI engines change the picture entirely: stakeholders now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot the same questions they used to type into Google, and what those engines synthesize is increasingly the canonical answer. The discipline expands accordingly. Ranking optimization remains important because the engines pull from the same sources Google indexes. New disciplines layer on: source attribution work (which sources each engine relies on for which questions), monitoring the narrative across multiple models (because the engines diverge on the same question), and shaping the entity records the engines use to pull answers, not just search ranking. We built AIQ in 2023 specifically because the industry needed a tool calibrated to this layer, and it has become the most active product in our portfolio. The shift is at the same magnitude as Google’s emergence in the late 1990s.