Does AI really have a meaningful effect on brand reputation today?

Yes. Across every stakeholder category, the people who decide whether to buy from, work for, write about, or invest in a company increasingly form their first impression through an AI engine, and they do it before they ever make contact. That makes AI a real, present-day input into reputation rather than a theoretical one.

The same pattern across every audience

Each major stakeholder group has a documented habit of researching before engaging, and that research is moving into AI engines:

• Buyers, B2B buyers complete roughly 70% of their buying journey on their own research before talking to a vendor, and a large majority prefer to research independently first. AI assistants are becoming part of that pre-contact research.
• Candidates, senior candidates research employers before applying or accepting, and AI is now part of that step: in one survey, 54% of workers said they ask AI to judge whether a company is worth pursuing (“Is the culture right for me?”).
• Journalists, journalists near-universally research subjects before an interview (94% say they almost always review a subject’s work beforehand, and the large majority use search engines to do their job), with AI tools entering that background-research workflow.
• Investors, investors and allocators increasingly run AI-based research before formal diligence; a large share of investment firms now use AI in deal sourcing and diligence workflows.

Why the engine matters, not just “AI”

This is not one undifferentiated “AI” effect. The eight major engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode, answer the same question about a company differently, because they draw on different sources and weight them differently. So the practical question for a communications or reputation leader is specific:

1. Which engines are influencing which audiences for this company?
2. Which sources are driving each engine’s narrative?
3. Where are the leverage points to change it?

AIQ was built to answer exactly those questions, monitoring how the eight major AI engines represent a brand, its executives, and its narratives. The takeaway for any CCO is that AI’s effect on reputation is no longer the question; the live question is which engines, fed by which sources, are shaping each audience’s view.