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

The shift from theoretical to measurable happened in 2024 and accelerated through 2025. Adoption data, hiring survey data, and our own AIQ™ traffic show the same pattern across every stakeholder category we track. Buyers research vendors through ChatGPT before requesting a demo. Candidates ask Gemini about employer culture before accepting an interview. Journalists open Perplexity for background before drafting a piece. Investors run companies through Copilot in pre-meeting prep. The business effect is now observable in deal velocity, talent pipeline conversion, and crisis-response timing. The question for any CCO is not whether AI affects reputation – it does – but which engines are influencing which audiences for the company specifically, which sources are driving each engine’s narrative, and where the leverage points sit. AIQ™ was built to answer those questions and they are now standard reputation questions.