How do you assess whether a reputation management firm understands AI and LLM search?

Assessing whether a firm genuinely understands the AI engines matters now, because many have bolted on AI language without the underlying capability. The real signals: proprietary monitoring that tracks what the models actually say, since you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and credible monitoring spans multiple engines because ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode answer the same question differently. A sound methodology for influence, which means shaping the sources the models draw on – entity signals, authoritative content, structured data – rather than claiming to edit model outputs directly, which no one can do. Structured reporting that characterizes the AI narrative over time rather than one-off screenshots. And integration with the broader reputation program, since AI narrative is downstream of the same entity and content work that drives search. A firm that talks about AI but cannot show monitoring or explain the source-influence mechanism is improvising. We built AIQ™ specifically to do this measurement and tie it to the rest of the work.