AI talks about your company. But who did it learn from?.

Being found is no longer enough.

For years the question was: when someone searches for our company, do they find us? That is the territory of SEO: making content and websites accessible, relevant and authoritative for search engines.

With generative AI the question changes. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity about a company, they do not necessarily get a list of links: they get an answer built from different information and sources.

Hence the growing attention to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): not only being found, but managing to enter the answers generated by AI.

For corporate communication, however, there is a further step. Being cited matters; being represented correctly matters even more. An AI can talk about a company without mainly using its official sources, it can favour some information, ignore other information or build associations different from those the brand considers strategic.

This is where GEO meets AI Reputation. It is not enough to ask “Are we cited?”. We also need to ask: what is being said about us? Through which sources? Which topics are associated with the brand? Is the information backed by evidence? Do the different AI assistants return the same representation?

This is the territory Aurelian Lab works on. With AI Brand Reputation analysis we study how different LLMs represent an organisation, identifying convergences and divergences, evidence, missing narratives and potential risk areas. With AI Sustainability Reputation we apply the same analysis to sustainability and ESG information.

The new challenge of corporate communication is not only to be present, found and cited. It is also to be understood and represented correctly.

And perhaps this is the question every communication director should start asking: when AI talks about our company, do we recognise the company we have built?