Some trends can be picked ahead of their time, however the explosiveness of a random tweet, call-to-action or cat video is almost impossible to pin-point.
While trends will mostly fade back and be replaced with another, the occasional and rare trend can have legitimate and measurable impacts on society. A recent example of this is the anti-plastic straw movement that took off in 2018.
It started with a terribly sad and visceral video of a straw being removed from the nose of a sea turtle – it’s likely you’ve seen it yourself. The internet is filled with images and videos relating to the impacts of pollution and climate change on the wildlife, however this video happened to stick in the social media sphere long enough to cause a stir.
In the context of environmental upset and helplessness, the plastic straw became the epitome of our harmful single-use plastic culture. In the space of a couple of months, plastic straws were disappearing from venues and public discourse stigmatised their use. Massive chain restaurants such as McDonalds and Starbucks announced plans to ban the plastic straw, as well as some cities and countries introducing bans or taxes on similar single-use products.
While this is ultimately a positive movement with good intention, rejecting the use of plastic straws is an easy and short-term relief to an overwhelming frustration with single-use consumer culture. This year we’ve been seeing similar trends emerge with the rise of keep-cup popularity and debates over plastic bags in super markets.
These trends may be tokenistic, however, they are telling of widespread sentiment and signify the public’s desire to be heard and responded too.
Loren is an experienced marketing professional who translates data and insights using Isentia solutions into trends and research, bringing clients closer to the benefits of audience intelligence. Loren thrives on introducing the groundbreaking ways in which data and insights can help a brand or organisation, enabling them to exceed their strategic objectives and goals.
An organisation’s reputation is at its core, really how people feel about them. These feelings can be based on their interaction and knowledge of the brand, or their experience with the products and services the organisation provides. This reputation is important as it can often dictate the actions or choices audiences and buyers make, impacting an organisation financially and its ability to grow. If managed and measured, the value of an organisations reputation can safeguarded and used as a source of growth by strategically influencing key consumer’s consideration over the competition and the market more broadly.
People can interact directly with an organisation more than ever before, on social media, targeted advertisements, in-store experiences, customer support to name a few.
Social media is a great place to listen to the voice of consumers and key audiences who choose to voice their experiences online. It provides insight into what your organisation has done well or needs to do better. When used in conjunction with additional data, like survey analysis it can also reveal what channels and content are contributing to this perception, and how this can be shifted. Drawing from online resources and social media, Isentia has established 3 drivers to identify and quantify an organisation’s reputation.
The first driver is about the future direction of an organisation.
Does your organisation have a strong leader? Does your organisation seek to innovate? Does it shape the way society thinks? Is your organisation authentic in its messaging? Is your organisation likely to succeed?
When an organisation shows these qualities, it raises consumer trust and confidence, but it’s important that this is authentic. An example of this is Honestbee. Honestbee’s strategy covered several of these points - they were a fast expanding and innovative Singaporean startup in the online grocery delivery business. The founders focused on being perceived as successful, with plans for rapid expansion.
However, In October 2018, Habitat, the world’s first tech-integrated multi-sensory grocery and dining destination launched. Three months after the launch of Habitat, it was discovered Honestbee was deep in financial debt. This was a shock to the industry as Honestbee had a good strategy. Their downfall had been in their inauthentic messaging which resulted in the organisation losing trust of their consumers and investors.
Culture is determined by the organisation having strong values and integrity.
Is the organisation socially responsible? Are practices fair and transparent? Do they promote a balanced workplace? Is it an environment where people aspire to work? Do they have ethical relationships with their business partners?
The growing number of organisations ‘going green’ is as good example of how the market can reflect and appeal to the values of today, in this case by demonstrating they're more environmentally conscious. In a 2019 Nielsen study, it was shown 1 in 3 consumers prefer eco- friendly products. Both Fairprice and Redmart, grocery chains in Singapore, also expressed growth in demand for their environmentally friendly products.
An organisation’s workplace culture, including ethical behaviour can also negatively impact an organisation. For example, Google was challenged for the way cases of sexual harassment were handled within the workplace. They were also challenged for questionable deals in AI technology that resulted in a protest of 20,000 employees across their offices. Google’s poor behaviour was exposed which led to criticism from Amnesty International and a backlash on social media.
Delivery is how good an organisation is at delivering on it’s day to day business.
Do people perceive the organisations products are good quality? Are the products well received? Is the organisation well known in the industry? Do customers have a good experience? Are they successful?
A good example of how delivery can be analysed is in the sphere of reputation is the case of, Razer Inc. known as an organisation passionate about gaming. With a tagline ‘For Gamers. By Gamers’, they are well known in the gaming industry for supply gaming software, hardware and accessories.
According to their annual report, their revenue last year, hit an all-time high of 712 billion US dollars. While online reviews of their mostly praise the high quality of Razer products, a common complaint on sites such as trustpilot.com, Reddit and Forum Hardwarezone are about slow or unhelpful customer support. Some customers even expressed that due to the poor customer support for products, they were even considering switching brands. This signals an opportunity. While Razer Inc has performed well financially and seemingly has a message that appeals to their key consumer, by improving their touchpoint experience and capacity to deliver they could potentially eclipse the competition and swing those who were apathetic towards other brands.
This is just a small glimpse of how your organisation’s reputation can be analysed and measured by a combination of social media data and more traditional market research techniques. Executing a broad analysis of your organisation based on the 3 drivers of Strategy, Culture and Delivery, we can assist in gauging your organisation’s reputation and how it fares against competitors. With a clear metric for overall reputation and a breakdown of performance by driver, Isentia's Reputation Analysis helps your organisation identify areas for improvement and where there are opportunities to strengthen PR, marketing and engagement strategies.
Request a sample of Isentia's Reputation Analysis here.
An organisation’s reputation is at its core, really how people feel about them. These feelings can be based on their interaction and knowledge of the brand, or their experience with the products and services the organisation provides. This reputation is important as it can often dictate the actions or choices audiences and buyers make, impacting […]
Audiences are no longer finding information through traditional search engines that favour established news outlets. AI models now highlight highly relevant and contextual information to audiences to often include niche and regional publications alongside major news media. This change challenges the old media hierarchy around tiered publications and pushes organisations to reconsider how and where they need to show up to stay visible in an AI-first world.
Yes, organisations must focus on optimising their own content for LLMs, but will that always drastically increase the chances of AI models picking up your page? Probably not always. Smart strategy means targeting the specific publications your actual target audience reads — because those are the sources AI models retrieve when answering niche questions.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is changing how brands approach online visibility. For years, traditional SEO meant focusing on your own site—optimising keywords, building backlinks, and improving on-page content. But AI models work differently. Instead of just using your website, these AI engines rely on trusted third-party sources to answer questions. This shift is taking place gradually, of course. LLMs increasingly source from earned media (where it is accessible) and even offsite links from trusted sites. Owned media is still where the organisation has maximum control of how it’s own content travels, but a pivotal strategy shift is needed to match what AI models are picking up and citing.
To succeed with AI search, comms professionals need to think more like a digital PR strategist than a SEO expert. The best way to stand out is by earning mentions, quotes, and citations in the external publications your audience—and the AI systems they use—trust most. This does not make a distinction between Tier 1 or Tier 2 media. If AI models are crawling sites that mention an organisation, but the organisation does not acknowledge or even know those sites are being prioritised by LLMs, they risk falling behind in being the right kind of visible.
To make this strategy work, looking beyond common metrics like traffic to the site or domain authority is not enough. Even a respected industry site will probably not influence AI answers as much if its content is behind a paywall or blocked from search engines. For AI visibility, accessibility to the site or page, structured data that can be crawled, and strong audience alignment are important. Since AI systems use both slow training cycles and fast real-time web searches (RAG), being featured on accessible, relevant niche sites helps an organisation show up accurately when models learn and when they search the web in real time.
According to Isentia's report How AI is destabilising trust and reputation amongst audiences, LLMs cite industry and trade publications about twice as often as traditional news sources. Company content and industry press make up over 60% of the share of voice LLMs use, while traditional news is twice as likely to generate negative sentiment. Thus, tier 1 outlets no longer automatically dominate AI-generated responses and may sometimes have the opposite effect.
Two main factors are driving this shift in which media is picked up by LLMs:
Which type of media gets cited relies upon how AI models scan different pages. If these models are citing much more niche media outlets, we can assume that a lot of these pages that are consulted could be a part of very relevant Tier 2 media that ends up actually getting cited, and that we’re seeing more and more examples of in AI answers. At the IABC APAC and Isentia webinar on measuring brand visibility in AI answers, Prashant Saxena, Isentia's VP of Revenue and Insights for SEA, stated that in the search era "we would get sources on our page one, page two, mostly page one", and people would click through to form their own opinions. The combined click-through rate in that era was 35 to 40 per cent. Nowadays, he says, "it's just four to five per cent" — since LLMs provide a smooth, ready-made answer and "most of us aren't really checking the citations".
Communications teams now face a new consideration: the distinction between sources that are consulted and those that are cited. At the IABC APAC and Isentia webinar, Takeo Apitzsch, Hoffman Agency’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, explained that AI models scan hundreds of pages to generate an answer but cite only a select few to users. This means that the audience sees only a small, curated portion of the sources that actually influenced the AI's response and a lot of what actually shapes the AI answer doesn’t get visible credit. Therefore, organisations need to make sure they reach out to those publications that AI models can actually crawl and audiences trust the most.
We are seeing four practical shifts:
Structurally, as Ashley Knapp, Head of Brand and Corporate Affairs, East Asia at Schneider Electric noted during the webinar, these efforts can no longer remain siloed. Owned, earned, shared, and paid media have traditionally been managed by separate teams. Now, because of AI visibility, this required a unified approach, as models do not distinguish between departments but are first to detect inconsistencies.
This also means reconsidering the PESO (paid, earned, shared and owned) strategy deployed by organisations since the way that LLMs access and prioritise them has changed. They prioritise brevity in content due to the high costs of GPUs and data centres. As a result, the shortest, clearest, and most trusted answers are favoured which benefits brands with strong reputations. Earned media remains important, but its influence now depends more on the credibility of the analyst than the platform. Shared content amplifies messages more than ever but is also where misinformation spreads fastest. Paid media is becoming more prominent in some models, though brands are still learning how this impacts visibility.
This shift requires media monitoring companies to evolve. Tracking mentions and sentiment across media channels has been central to media intelligence, but AI visibility has added a new dimension to this. This means monitoring not only what is said about an organisation, but also which sources AI models use when answering questions about that organisation, and assessing how current, authoritative, and consistent those sources are. This gives media monitoring organisations an opportunity to own what they’ve developed and also be thought leaders in this space. Stakeholders value the “so what” advice much more than just knowing “this is what is being said about you in the media”.
Lumina AI View addresses this by tracking which sources ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other models cite when representing an organisation, benchmarks citations against competitors, identifies narrative shifts before they reach stakeholders, and regularly scores AI visibility against four reputation pillars: Direction, Performance, Integrity, and Innovation, These pillars have always supported reputation management, now applied to a largely unseen audience.
If you're weighing up where a tool like this sits alongside the rest of your stack, our own comparison, Best AI Tools for PR & Comms Teams (2026), breaks down how AI-assisted coverage, measurement, crisis response and reporting tools stack up, Lumina included.
Because that’s really the mindset shift comms teams, and the firms advising them both need to make. As Takeo put it on the IABC APAC and Isentia webinar: “I fear that this is the mindset shift communications teams and their advisors must adopt. I fear that AIs will be your secondary, and if not, at least equal… audience in the future.” Beyond human visibility, reputation is about being accurately represented by the systems that mediate access to your audience, which is an additional layer that cannot be trivialised anymore.
Want to see which sources are shaping how AI describes your organisation? Get in touch about Lumina AI View.
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Would you trust a brand more if an AI model recommended it? For many, the answer is yes – and it’s changing the very nature of PR & Comms.
Our latest report digs into the changing nature of trust, as audiences turn to AI models for quick answers instead of going to organisations or media outlets directly, with AI fast becoming the final stop in the comms cycle.
This report unpacks:
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