What is the difference between reputation management and public relations?

Public relations and reputation management are complementary disciplines with different working layers. PR works at the source: pitching journalists, placing thought leadership, managing executive visibility, responding to inquiries. Its work product is media coverage. Reputation management works at the layer above: ensuring that when someone Googles the brand or asks an AI engine about it, what comes back is structurally accurate. That includes the placed PR coverage but also Wikipedia, Wikidata, schema, Knowledge Panels, the entity layer that defines who the company is to the engines, and the AI narrative running parallel to all of it. PR is upstream of perception; reputation management is downstream, where most stakeholders actually form their impressions. The strongest programs are coordinated across both, with the comms team and the reputation team operating from the same playbook.