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Audio Note Length | 4 min 25 sec

I used to tell people: go Google yourself. See what comes up. That’s what a prospect sees before they ever talk to you.

These days, that’s not enough. You also need to ask AI what it knows about you.

Here’s why.

I always ask new clients and prospects the same question: “How did you find me?”

The answer used to be simple. “You were referred by…” and they’d give me a name. Or, “Google search.”

That’s changed this year. What I’m hearing instead is one of two things:

→ Used AI to find information about me AFTER someone referred me

→ Asked AI a question and I showed up as a resource in the answers

Not one person specifically mentioned my LinkedIn posts, Reddit comments, blog, podcast interviews, newsletter… or starting with a Google search.

Here’s the thing.

The personal referral put me on their radar. The AI referral (that’s what I’m calling it) made them decide to reach out.

What they found wasn’t a profile. It was a body of work. All of it feeding the models that now answer their questions… before I do.

Why this matters more than it seems

For years, brand strategy has come down to one idea: brand is reputation. It’s what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

That definition hasn’t changed. But the room has.

The room now includes ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. And they’re not neutral. They’re trained on what you’ve published, what you’ve said, what’s been written about you. If that body of work doesn’t exist, or doesn’t say much, the model has nothing to work with when someone asks.

Your reputation used to live in people’s heads and in Google’s index. Now it also lives in training data. And training data doesn’t forget a weak signal. It just doesn’t surface you at all.

What this means if you’re building a services business

Go ask ChatGPT what it knows about you.

The question isn’t “how’s my content doing.” It’s “does the model see me as an authority with subject matter expertise?”

That answer matters more than your engagement rate on social media or the number of clicks on your blog.

Because the referral isn’t the only thing that matters anymore. The AI referral check is. And you don’t get to control that check. You only get to control what you’ve put out there for it to find.

This is what reputation management actually is now

Brand reputation management used to mean watching press mentions and review sites. Making sure the story stayed straight.

That practice hasn’t gone away. It’s expanded. Now it means actively shaping what shows up when someone, or something, looks you up. Deciding what gets published, where, and how. Making sure the version of you that surfaces, whether it’s a Google result or a model’s answer, is the version you’d actually choose.

Positioning isn’t just a statement you write once and put on a slide. It’s the sum of everything visible about you, indexed and re-indexed every time you publish, every time someone else writes about you, every time a model retrains.

Left alone, that sum drifts. Managed well, it doesn’t.

The world is going to form an opinion of you either way. The only question is whether you had a hand in it.

That’s all we have time for today. Until our next BrandTherapy session…

Thanks,

Andy

P.S. Are you facing a specific business challenge and need expert advice quickly? Book a 1:1 advisory call now. I’ll give you no-nonsense advice that you can put into action immediately, guaranteed. → Book a BrandTherapy Session

P.P.S. If this note made you think of someone, feel free to forward it. Sometimes an outside perspective is all it takes to create clarity.