The Evolution of Perception: Why Corporate Reputation Management is Changing and What You Can Do About it

For decades, reputation management operated in what we would now call an era of trust. Information about companies flowed through trusted and credible sources, and companies could take the lead in controlling their narrative through managed media relations, advertising and corporate communications. We measured reputation by directly asking stakeholders.  

The rise of social media shifted the landscape: trust gave way to speed.  

Information—true or not—traveled faster than organizations could respond. Viral videos captured wrongdoing. This summer we watched as a concert Kiss Cam led to the resignation of a tech company CEO, meanwhile artificial bot networks amplified fake crises to instigate outrage.  

Many organizations have adapted by leveraging news and social listening capabilities to pay attention to shifts in reputation and issues.  

While we are still in this era of speed, there is a new dimension that is fundamentally changing reputation management efforts: that is the era of ‘truth.’ 

Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model systems (LLMs) are analyzing vast amounts of information and presenting what appears to be an authoritative, factual answer about a company’s reputation. When someone asks a question on one of these systems, such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude, they receive very confident answers that feel like the truth. These systems are reshaping consumer behavior: according to recent APCO research, only one in four Americans regularly click on the links in AI summaries to confirm information—meaning most people accept what AI says as truth without verification.  

However, we’re learning that this truth can be deeply flawed. Many are making the mistake in thinking that these AI systems are databases—instead, these LLMs synthesize the information they have to create something new. Further, the answers the LLMs provide are probabilistic, meaning it is predicting the most likely next word and can provide different responses each time—there is not a fixed output.  

This means that there is a new dimension of perception that organizations need to take into account to support their reputation management efforts. To most effectively manage reputation, organizations need to be thinking now across the three dimensions of perception:  

• Stakeholder perception: What people think and say. 

• Digital perception: What people express, share and react to in news/social media. 

• LLM generated perception: What AI systems synthesize and present as truth.  

If reputation is perception, then the right intelligence needs to capture where reputation actually forms—and today, that’s across these three distinct dimensions.  

After more than two decades of measuring corporate reputation globally, we’ve learned that the most successful strategies are built on complete information. As we navigate this new era, organizations need a new framework—one that acknowledges perception now forms across three dimensions, not one or two.