3BL News
MAY 7, 2026

AI is Now a Reputation Channel, and Most Brands Aren’t Paying Attention.

Most of today’s searches start with AI. If your brand isn’t there, or it’s portrayed negatively, that has serious implications for reputation and trust. We couldn't find a tool to measure this connection well enough for our customers. So, we built one.


You know exactly what your company’s latest media coverage looks like. You have social listening alerts set up. You can track your search ranking for any given month. But if asked what AI is saying about your brand, would you be able to answer that?

The truth is, most brands can’t, and that’s a big problem.

  • 90%+ of B2B buyers use AI in purchasing (Forrester)
  • 75%+ of global investors trust AI to support investment decisions (BridgeWise)
  • 50%+ of consumers intentionally choose AI over traditional search (McKinsey)

Millions of consumers now turn to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini before they ever open a traditional search engine. The responses they see directly influence where they choose to spend their money, who they choose to work for, and which brands they choose to trust.

The channel shift that snuck up on everyone

Over recent decades, corporate communications and corporate affairs teams have gotten very good at managing reputation across the channels they work with every day: media coverage, social, search results, and owned content. They may have mastered the traditional playbook for reputation, but AI has introduced something new — and it doesn’t follow the same rules.

The reputation risks hiding in AI right now

Most brands have no visibility into how they are showing up. Are you being surfaced at all? And if you are, is it negative? Is it accurate and fair?

We started asking those same questions, and we couldn’t find a tool that gave us a good enough answer for our customers. So, we built one.

Introducing 3BL’s AI Visibility Tracker, the first tool built specifically to analyze how your brand is being perceived, discussed, and characterized within AI platforms.

Here’s what makes it different:

  • You get the full picture of your AI visibility. You don’t just see whether your brand is showing up, but where, how, and whether it is strong or weak — broken down by platform, topic, and query intent.
  • Then put that visibility in context. Because knowing your own numbers only tells you so much, we measure your brand’s visibility alongside named competitors on the topics you want to lead.
  • We didn’t build this on generic search queries. Our database includes thousands of queries tied to brand governance, reputation and trust, asked by real people and curated by corporate responsibility experts.
  • Most sentiment tools only flag keywords. We go beyond that. Our tracker is smart enough to tell you how your brand is being discussed — even in AI responses that also mention problems — so we never miss the nuance in complex conversations.

AI isn’t a future consideration for reputation. It’s a present one.

The brands that will lead into the future won’t wait for AI visibility to become a standard metric. They’re the ones who are paying attention now.

We’d love to show you where your brand stands and how you can improve. Check out your AI Visibility Score today. What you find may surprise you.

See my AI Visibility Score