{"id":153858,"date":"2026-09-24T14:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=153858"},"modified":"2026-09-25T13:30:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T12:30:59","slug":"how-llms-are-already-impacting-organisational-reputation-and-what-comms-team-can-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/how-llms-are-already-impacting-organisational-reputation-and-what-comms-team-can-do-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How LLMs are already impacting organisational reputation, and what comms teams can do about it"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LLM<\/p>\n

When someone wants to know whether they can trust your organisation, there’s a good chance they’ll ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude<\/a> before they ask you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What does this mean for comms teams tasked with protecting reputation? The latest Vuelio webinar ‘How LLMs are already impacting organisational reputation’ explored this challenge, covering how to tell the narratives that land from the messaging that doesn’t, ways to audit what AI tools know about your organisation, and how to trace where their information comes from.<\/p>\n

Hosted by Vuelio’s Content & Comms Manager P-J Boyd and Head of Insights Strategy<\/a> Amy Chappell, we examined the reaction to UK supermarket financial results as a case study, following how narratives travelled through the media and into AI-generated answers.<\/p>\n

Watch the full webinar here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The results highlighted the continued importance of the traditional comms toolkit in an era where AI is becoming both an intermediary and a new stakeholder<\/a> for organisations to understand.<\/p>\n

AI is increasingly the first port of call for your stakeholders<\/h2>\n

Comms teams have always had intermediaries between them and their audiences – the media and regulators as just two examples. But they have also developed effective ways of working with those intermediaries, from media outreach to in-person networking. AI is a different kind of intermediary. It sits in the middle ground, but also happens to be a stakeholder in its own right that can be influenced.<\/p>\n

First, it’s worth considering AI’s growing influence. Bain & Company’s ‘Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI<\/a>‘ report found that 80% of consumers rely on AI-generated summaries to make purchase decisions. Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Brand Visibility Index found that 35% of consumers use AI tools at the discovery and initial-ideas stage of research, compared with just 13.6% using traditional search. Reputation management has had to adapt quickly as a result.<\/p>\n

\"Bain<\/p>\n

The media point of view<\/h2>\n

This isn’t only a challenge for PR and comms teams. At Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference 2026<\/a>, News UK’s Chief Technology Officer Tom Jackson shared that: ‘In the last six months, about a fifth of our traffic was non-human across all of our products.’ Reach plc’s Chief Content Officer David Higgerson added: ‘People are less likely to see us and they’re less likely to come back at the moment.’<\/p>\n

According to Ofcom’s 2026 News Report<\/a>, around one in five people in the UK now use AI apps as a source of news. That puts LLMs between comms teams and the media, as well as between comms teams and their audiences.<\/p>\n

Does AI require a whole new approach to reputation management?<\/h2>\n

In a previous Vuelio webinar ‘AI as the new PR & comms stakeholder<\/a>‘, Dr Anne Gregory described AI as ‘a powerful actor in the information ecosystem’. According to Amy Chappell, that doesn’t mean throwing out the PR playbook\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Amy<\/p>\n

‘AI is a new stakeholder \u2014 or perhaps a new audience \u2014 that we need to understand, but when you think about how an LLM forms an understanding of an organisation, it actually mirrors a communications challenge we’ve been dealing with for years,’ Amy explained.<\/p>\n

‘It’s taking in what other people are saying about you, what the media is reporting, what information you’re putting out yourself, and the narratives that have built up over time.’<\/p>\n

‘We’re still talking about building authority, getting the right messages into credible sources, understanding how narratives are developing and measuring whether communications are having the impact we intended. What’s changed is that we now have another layer interpreting all of that information and presenting it back to our audiences.’<\/p>\n

Case study: two UK supermarkets, one shared challenge<\/h2>\n

To show this in practice, Vuelio’s Insights team studied the ‘big two’ UK supermarkets and their annual financial results from earlier this year for our latest Vuelio report<\/a>. Both supermarkets pointed to the Iran conflict as a pressure on business, but they framed it very differently. Supermarket A led on resilience and preparedness, while Supermarket B put more weight on weaker demand, cost pressures, and the external environment.<\/p>\n

‘We wanted to look beyond simply asking, “What does AI say about these organisations?”‘ said Amy. ‘Instead, we looked at the whole information journey: what the organisations themselves said, how those messages were interpreted and amplified through earned media, and then what information the major LLMs were drawing on when answering questions about them.’<\/p>\n

Amy was clear that communications alone didn’t decide what happened next. Wider business and market factors were at play. But the case offered a rare chance to watch two competing narratives travel through the media and then into AI.<\/p>\n

\"Supermarket<\/p>\n

Timing matters, but so does the narrative<\/h2>\n

Coverage was closely linked; two in three articles mentioned both supermarkets, rather than covering either one on its own.<\/p>\n

‘Organisations don’t entirely get to control the context in which they’re discussed,’ said Amy. ‘Supermarket A wasn’t just being judged against its own results or its own messaging \u2014 it was being compared directly with its competitor.’<\/p>\n

Supermarket A also had a first-mover advantage, entering the conversation first and generating more coverage during the initial spike, which set the scene with its intended narrative.<\/p>\n

But being first isn’t always positive, as Amy warned: the first organisation mentioned can become the point of comparison, and each new entrant to the story prolongs the attention on it. Here, however, the narrative around Supermarket A was broadly positive, so the ongoing comparison reinforced its message of resilience.<\/p>\n

‘Timing matters, but so does the narrative you’re establishing when you are first,’ said Amy.<\/p>\n

The market reaction differed as well. Supermarket A’s share price held relatively steady while Supermarket B’s fell. That doesn’t prove cause and effect, but it was part of the context in which the two reputational stories developed.<\/p>\n

\"Media<\/p>\n

AI cited the media more than the organisations themselves<\/h2>\n

Using Vuelio’s Lumina AI View<\/a>, the Insights team tracked which sources the major LLMs cited when answering questions about the supermarkets. You might expect an organisation’s own website and corporate content to feature heavily, but instead, earned media dominated: 94% of the links cited in AI answers came from non-paid media, and one in four citations came from journalism alone. Supermarket A appeared more strongly within those earned-media citations.<\/p>\n

‘We’ve talked a lot about AI potentially disrupting PR, but what we’re seeing here actually reinforces the value of something PR teams have been doing for decades: building credibility through authoritative third-party coverage,’ said Amy.<\/p>\n

Authority over volume<\/h2>\n

Is the goal simply to generate as much earned coverage as possible? ‘No \u2014 and that’s a really important distinction,’ said Amy.<\/p>\n

Across the data, LLM responses favoured authoritative sources over the more sensational narratives in the coverage.<\/p>\n

‘In some ways, this comes back to an age-old challenge in communications measurement,’ Amy explained. ‘We’ve been trying to move away from simply counting coverage for years. Volume tells you how much attention you’re getting, but not necessarily whether that attention is valuable.’<\/p>\n

‘It’s about understanding the quality and context of that coverage: where you’re appearing, what those sources are saying about you, whether your key messages are getting through, how you’re being positioned against competitors, and whether you’re building authority around the topics you actually want to be known for.’<\/p>\n

‘AI gives us another reason to make that shift, because it’s not simply the amount of information about you that matters \u2014 it’s the information and narratives that are actually influencing how you’re represented.’<\/p>\n

\"AI<\/p>\n

Yesterday’s coverage still counts<\/h2>\n

Traditionally, reputation is closely linked to the news cycle: something happens, coverage spikes, and the story eventually moves on. But AI doesn’t follow that rhythm. The research found LLMs citing content that was months, and sometimes years, old. What mattered was whether a source was useful and authoritative, not whether it was new.<\/p>\n

‘A crisis disappearing from today’s headlines doesn’t necessarily mean it has disappeared from the information environment,’ said Amy. ‘Equally, a really strong piece of earned coverage can continue working for an organisation long after the original campaign has finished.’<\/p>\n

Authority doesn’t only come from national or high-reach titles, either. Depending on the question, specialist and trade publications can carry real weight on their subject.<\/p>\n

‘The question becomes less, “How much coverage did we get this month?” and more, “What are we contributing to the longer-term body of information that people \u2014 and now AI \u2014 use to understand us?”‘<\/p>\n

\"AI_Content_Age_Chart\"<\/p>\n

Five ways to build and protect reputation in the AI era<\/h2>\n

1) Treat AI as another stakeholder<\/h3>\n

It doesn’t replace your traditional audiences. It’s an extra one to understand and influence.<\/p>\n

2) Build authority through earned media<\/h3>\n

Consistent, high-quality third-party coverage is what AI answers draw on most.<\/p>\n

3) Measure narrative quality, not just volume<\/h3>\n

‘It’s really about moving beyond counting mentions,’ said Amy. ‘Are the messages you want to land actually coming through? Which narratives are becoming associated with you? Are you appearing in authoritative sources? How are you positioned against competitors?’ Good measurement should already answer these questions. The next step is linking them to how the same narratives appear across AI.<\/p>\n

4) Monitor how you show up across different models<\/h3>\n

Different LLMs prioritise different factors and present organisations differently.<\/p>\n

5) Recognise that the news lifecycle has changed<\/h3>\n

Today’s earned media can keep shaping AI answers long after the news cycle moves on.<\/p>\n

‘That’s why AI reputation isn’t really a completely separate discipline,’ said Amy. ‘It gives us another reason to think much more deliberately about the reputation we’re building through communications over time.’<\/p>\n

Tracking your AI reputation with Lumina AI View<\/h2>\n

The case study explored in the webinar was undertaken with Lumina AI View, part of Vuelio’s Lumina AI suite, which turns traditional media monitoring into narrative intelligence. AI View shows PR and comms teams what AI knows about them and their clients, and where it learned it. It tracks the sources that models including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude cite when describing organisations, and measures how strong and how good those citations are. Teams can track progress over time and get alerts when citation patterns change.<\/p>\n

\"AI<\/p>\n

‘We don’t want to look at AI reputation in isolation,’ said Amy. ‘We can look at what the media is saying, how an organisation compares with its competitors, and then layer on how those same themes are being represented across different LLMs. Are the narratives we’re building through communications actually making their way into AI responses? Which sources are influencing those answers? And then, importantly, we can track that over time rather than treating a single ChatGPT response as a definitive measure of your reputation.’<\/p>\n

Read more in Vuelio’s latest report ‘The role of AI, LLMs, and earned media in shaping reputation<\/a>‘. <\/em><\/p>\n

To find out how Lumina AI View and the Vuelio Insights team can help you understand your AI reputation, get in touch<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When someone wants to know whether they can trust your organisation, there’s a good chance they’ll ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude before they ask you. What does this mean for comms teams tasked with protecting reputation? The latest Vuelio webinar, ‘How LLMs are already impacting organisational reputation’ explored this challenge, covering how to tell the narratives that land from the messaging that doesn’t, ways to audit what AI tools know about your organisation, and how to trace where their information comes from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":423,"featured_media":153880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7272,3725,3729],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/423"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153858"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153891,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153858\/revisions\/153891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}