How do you handle reputation during M&A activity?

M&A activity exposes whether the digital infrastructure on both sides of the deal actually reflects current reality. Diligence teams pull every search result, AI response, Wikipedia article, and structured data signal on both companies and on the key executives, and inconsistencies between those layers and the deal narrative slow the process or move the price. Pre-announcement, we work on entity hygiene (Wikidata, schema, sameAs links, the identifiers that tell the engines a set of profiles are the same entity), accurate descriptions in AI engines (often a recurring problem when an AI is confidently telling stakeholders incorrect things about a company’s ownership, scope, or leadership), and Wikipedia article currency. Post-announcement, the same layers are updated with deal facts as they become public, AIQ tracks how the engines are absorbing the deal narrative across the eight models, and owned content covers the integration story for the period when stakeholders are actively researching. We have done this on both buy-side and sell-side mandates.