How do large language models like ChatGPT form opinions about companies?

LLMs do not form opinions in the human sense. They produce an answer from two streams: the training data they were built on (web pages, news archives, books, Wikipedia, structured datasets) and, at the moment of the question, live pages fetched from the web. When a user asks about a company, the model assembles an answer from the sources it treats as most authoritative on that topic, then renders it in confident prose. The practical implication for a reputation program is that influencing the model means influencing its sources: improving the authority and clarity of what Wikipedia, mainstream news, the company’s own sites, and structured data (the machine-readable facts behind a page) say. Prompting the model directly does nothing lasting, because it doesn’t remember what you tell it and rebuilds every answer fresh from the sources it trusts. Working on those sources, rather than on the engines themselves, is what moves the answer.