AI Is Already Defining Your Brand
Traditional reputation management tracks what journalists, influencers, and customers say.
Modern reputation management tracks what machines say, because Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini are now shaping first impressions for professionals and organisations, 78% of which now use generative AI in at least one business function (McKinsey, 2025).
At Harton Works, we call this Brand Alignment in the AI Era. It’s our Retrieval-First™ approach applied to reputation: monitoring, analysing, and correcting how AI systems summarise and cite your brand across millions of daily searches.
Brand Drift vs Reputation Drift
In the old world, brand drift happened when your messaging across ads, websites, and social channels lost consistency.
In the AI world, reputation drift happens when machines start pulling outdated, off-message, or inaccurate content to describe you — and you have no idea it’s happening.
Real examples we’ve seen:
A SaaS platform labelled “discontinued” after AI pulled from a 2019 forum post.
A financial advisory firm linked to a competitor’s compliance scandal due to context confusion.
An agency CEO’s expertise attributed to another professional with similar credentials.
If an AI system describes your competitor as “the market leader” and you as “one of several options,” that perception becomes reality for millions of searchers.
Who Needs This Service
→ Marketing teams noticing competitors being cited in AI search results while their own brand is invisible or misrepresented.
→ PR and brand managers who want to extend monitoring from human channels to machine-generated answers.
→ SEO professionals looking to integrate AI mention tracking into their visibility strategies.
→ Brands that can’t afford narrative drift in high-value markets where trust is everything.
How It Works
We offer three flexible entry points to align and protect your brand in AI-powered environments.
→ AI Reputation Audit
A one-time diagnostic testing 200+ brand-related queries across all major AI platforms to identify inaccuracies, gaps, and drift, followed by a prioritised fix plan.
→ Brand Alignment Strategy
A comprehensive programme to realign your brand in both AI and traditional channels. We optimise source content, citations, and structured data to ensure AI systems use the right information.
Our targeted correction campaigns show promising early results, with measurable improvements in brand positioning across multiple AI platforms within 90 days.
→ Ongoing AI Monitoring
Continuous tracking of AI mentions, sentiment, and positioning across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode — with monthly reporting and strategic adjustments.
Measuring Success
We measure success by tracking the share of accurate, on-message AI mentions over time. That means benchmarking how often your preferred positioning, facts, and descriptors appear in AI-generated summaries before and after intervention, and reporting percentage shifts alongside competitor comparisons. Every month, you see clear movement: less drift, more alignment, and a growing narrative advantage in the platforms that shape first impressions.
Setting Expectations
AI systems are ultimately black boxes — we can’t force them to use specific sources or wording, and some narrative issues may not be fixable through content optimisation alone. While early results often appear within 90 days, timelines vary by platform, query type, and the availability of authoritative correction sources. Our role is to maximise your chances by making the most trusted, most recent version of your story the easiest for AI to retrieve.
Next Steps
An AI Reputation Audit is a one-time engagement. Strategy and monitoring programmes run on a monthly retainer, with pricing based on query volume, competitor tracking, and update frequency. Client involvement is minimal — we handle research, monitoring, and recommendations, with your team approving or publishing updates.
Why Modern Reputation Management Requires AI Alignment
"AI brand semantic drift is off the walls. You have factual drift, intent drift, narrative collapse — and panicked brands coming saying, 'Clean that up.'" — Search Engine Land Panel Discussion, 2025
The shift is already here:
Google’s AI Overviews now appear in over 50% of searches — up from 25% less than a year ago. In some sectors, like health and finance, that figure rises to 76%.
ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity now pull in live web data for real-time answers. LLMs are trained on sources that may be outdated, biased, or contextually confused.
If you’re not actively monitoring and shaping these outputs, you’re leaving your reputation to be defined by algorithms and chance.
The brands that act now will own their AI narrative, while the rest will spend years undoing entrenched misconceptions.
Why Choose Harton Works?
While others bolt AI monitoring onto SEO as an afterthought, we’ve built it into our Retrieval-First™ framework from the start.
We’ve guided brands through every search evolution — from keyword-driven rankings to semantic search and entity indexing. Now, we’re applying that same proven methodology to reputation management in the AI era.
We do this by mapping the exact sources AI systems pull from, structuring your brand data so it’s machine-readable, and reinforcing your narrative across the high-authority sites those systems trust most. Then we run targeted correction campaigns — updating and restructuring your own content, placing authoritative updates in the external sources AI trusts most, and using feedback mechanisms where available to replace outdated or inaccurate information.
When the big platforms move into this space, they’ll surface data. We’ll still be the ones turning that data into narrative advantage. Tools can tell you what the AI is saying — we make sure it’s saying the right thing.
We make sure that when the AI talks about you, it’s saying exactly what you want it to.
Own Your AI Story
While others react to reputation drift, smart brands get ahead of it.
Start with an AI Reputation Audit.