Vuelio recently hosted a roundtable with a group of our charity clients, bringing together senior communications and media professionals for an open, peer-led discussion on a rapidly growing challenge: managing organisational reputation within Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs).
The roundtable brought together experts from leading charities, including the British Heart Foundation, Age UK, and the Stroke Association. The discussion explored how charities are navigating the emerging risks and opportunities associated with AI-driven search, reputation management, and organisational visibility in an increasingly AI-mediated information landscape.
Following a quick AI jargon-buster with Vuelio COO Kyle Lindsay, the conversation quickly moved to a broader strategic question:
As AI increasingly becomes another way people discover and understand organisations, what role should communications play in stewarding organisational reputation and public understanding?
For the senior communications and media leaders around the table, one thing was clear: AI is increasingly influencing how audiences discover, understand, and form opinions about organisations.
Rather than focusing solely on how organisations can optimise for AI, the discussion explored what this shift means for communications. AI hasn’t created an entirely new discipline for communicators, but has introduced another audience – one that interprets, combines, and redistributes information about organisations, often before someone has visited a website, read a news article, or spoken to an expert.
Drawing on the experiences, concerns, and practical approaches shared during the roundtable, here are key insights to help communications teams better understand what this shift means for organisational reputation, measurement, and future communications strategy.
1. AI is changing how reputation is formed
For decades, the path a supporter or journalist took to find your charity was predictable: Question → Google → Click → Read. Today, that journey is changing. Millions of active users are bypassing traditional search engines entirely, going straight to platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Instead of receiving a list of links, users get a synthesised answer.
‘People are reading the synthesised answer, not the article. Reputation often now forms inside the AI response.’ – Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy, Vuelio
If a major donor or a journalist queries an LLM about your cause tomorrow morning, they will likely absorb that generated snapshot before ever reaching your website or reading the original source material. Increasingly, the first impression of your organisation is being formed within an AI-generated answer rather than through a direct interaction with your own channels.
That doesn’t replace traditional media relations or stakeholder engagement. It does, however, introduce another place where organisational reputation is formed – one that Communications teams increasingly need to understand and measure.
2. Who owns AI reputation?
‘If ChatGPT gave a highly inaccurate answer about your organisation tomorrow, who owns fixing it?’- Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy, Vuelio
Is it IT? Digital? SEO? Marketing?
The consensus around the table was clear: while AI itself spans multiple business units, reputational challenges firmly sit within Communications and PR.
If your website had a typo, communications might not patch the code. But if that typo damaged your public standing or made its way into a journalist’s brief, comms would lead the response.
That perspective closely reflects Gartner’s recent view that communications is evolving beyond distributing messages towards stewarding public understanding across media, search and AI.
Rather than introducing an entirely new responsibility, AI reinforces many of the responsibilities communications teams already have: building trust, earning third-party credibility, shaping organisational narratives, and ensuring they are accurately understood.
Because LLMs synthesise information from multiple trusted sources rather than relying on a single source of truth, their understanding of an organisation is only as strong as the wider evidence ecosystem surrounding it. That makes consistency, credibility, and corroboration increasingly important – not just for the audiences communications teams have always engaged with, but for AI as well.
The role of communications isn’t to control every AI response. It’s to understand, influence, and measure the information ecosystem shaping those responses.
3. Understanding AI’s Information Ecosystem
Different AI models can return different answers, and different questions about the same organisation can surface different sources. Even the same prompt may produce differing responses over time as the information landscape evolves.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t patterns. While each platform has its own approach to retrieving and synthesising information, there are often consistent themes in the types of sources, organisations, and evidence that influence AI-generated answers. Rather than trying to optimise for one individual response, the discussion focused on understanding those broader patterns and the information ecosystem shaping them.
That ecosystem can include:
– Owned content
– Earned media
– Government and regulatory information
– Academic and research institutions
– Reference sites
– Industry bodies
– Partner organisations
The balance between these sources isn’t fixed. It changes depending on the organisation, the sector, the country and, perhaps most importantly, the question being asked.
‘Our own analysis demonstrates this. While individual responses vary, the broader evidence ecosystem influencing an organisation often shows clear and measurable patterns.’
This was one of the reasons the group discussed treating AI as another audience rather than another search engine. Just as different stakeholder groups consume information differently, AI-generated answers are shaped by different combinations of trusted evidence depending on the context.
Understanding those patterns is becoming increasingly important. It provides a blueprint for ‘winning’ AI, but also helps communications teams understand how their organisation is being interpreted, identify which evidence is shaping those answers, and measure how that evolves over time.
4. Trust is built through corroboration
There is a common misconception that Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or ‘AI SEO’ is a game of technical tricks. The roundtable data debunked this. LLMs do not simply parrot your press releases, but look for corroboration.
When synthesising a profile, an LLM compares your owned website claims against trusted third parties: journalists, government databases, academic institutions, and industry bodies. High-quality earned media footprint can heavily influence how these systems talk about you.
‘Earned media hasn’t become less important in the AI era. It’s arguably become more important because it increasingly influences the systems people are using to access information.’ – Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy, Vuelio
This led to one of the most interesting debates around the table – what actually makes earned media influential in AI-generated responses. Is it simply coverage in the biggest, most recognised publications, or does the prominence and substance of an individual article matter more?
We took that question to Vuelio’s Executive Director of AI Strategy, Ngaire Crawford. Her view was that the answer is both:
‘The quality of the coverage will really inform whether the model uses it as a source. It needs to help answer the question with clear facts and validated endorsement, so quality absolutely comes into it. Sometimes smaller sources are surfaced because there simply isn’t that quality in more reputable publications.’
For communications teams, that’s an important distinction. The objective is to go beyond securing coverage in the largest publications to build a strong, consistent evidence ecosystem around your organisation and your cause.
It’s another reminder that there is no definitive blueprint for ‘winning’ in LLMs yet. The models continue to evolve, and their weighting of different signals isn’t transparent. What remains consistent is the importance of producing accurate, trusted and well-corroborated information across the wider information landscape. And those are principles communications teams have always understood.
Practical Tips for Comms Teams:
The discussion concluded by moving away from theory and towards practical application. If AI is becoming another audience, what does that mean for day-to-day communications planning?
The consensus wasn’t that communications teams should completely rethink their strategies. Instead, it was about building on the principles they already know work.
Build a consistent evidence ecosystem
AI-generated answers are shaped by information from multiple trusted sources. Consistency across owned content, earned media, thought leadership, research and partner organisations helps reduce conflicting narratives and gives AI a stronger evidence base from which to build an understanding of your organisation.
Understand which sources shape AI’s understanding
Rather than focusing solely on traditional media lists, consider which publications, organisations, and evidence sources are consistently influencing AI-generated answers about your organisation and your sector. Those may include national media, but they could also include trade publications, academic research, government sources or trusted industry bodies.
Think beyond coverage
Communications teams have traditionally measured success through metrics such as coverage, reach, and engagement. Increasingly, there’s also value in understanding how that coverage contributes to the wider evidence ecosystem influencing AI-generated answers.
Keep humans in the loop
While AI can support research, planning, and content creation, the discussion reinforced that authenticity, judgement, and critical thinking remain essential. AI can accelerate communications, but it shouldn’t replace the expertise required to build trust and protect reputation.
Final Thoughts: Measure, Don’t Speculate
The session concluded with a shift toward measurement. Because AI systems are probabilistic and non-deterministic (meaning the same prompt can yield a different answer on a different day), tracking reputation requires a systematic framework over time, which is what Vuelio’s “AI View Score” is designed to do. Bringing several visibility signals together into one easy-to-track metric which can be shared internally to inform not only the Communications team but the wider stakeholders.
Throughout the roundtable, one theme consistently emerged: AI doesn’t replace the fundamentals of good communications, but expands them.
Just as communications teams have spent years measuring media reputation, stakeholder influence, and campaign effectiveness, AI introduces another audience whose understanding can also be monitored, measured and learned from.
Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy at Vuelio, said:
‘The goal isn’t to optimise for individual AI responses but to understand how your organisation is being interpreted over time, in the same way we’ve measured media reputation for years. AI simply introduces another audience whose understanding we now have the opportunity to measure and impact.’
Rather than asking whether an organisation can ‘win’ individual prompts, the discussion focused on understanding broader patterns: which evidence is shaping AI-generated answers, how that changes over time, and where communications teams have opportunities to strengthen organisational reputation.
Because AI systems continue to evolve, there will never be a single definitive answer to what AI says about an organisation. That’s why measurement matters. Looking beyond individual responses to understand the wider information ecosystem gives Communications teams a more meaningful way to track reputation, identify emerging trends and make informed strategic decisions.
This is the thinking behind Vuelio’s AI View. Rather than focusing on isolated prompts, AI View helps organisations understand the wider evidence ecosystem influencing AI-generated answers, bringing together visibility, authority, freshness, sentiment and dominance into a measurable framework that can be tracked over time.
Ultimately, communications has always been responsible for helping organisations earn trust, build credibility, and shape public understanding.
Get in touch with the Vuelio team if you’d like to see how AI View can help you understand your organisation’s visibility in AI-powered search. If you’re also interested in attending future roundtable events, just let us know – we’d love you to join us.
