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How AI is destabilising trust and reputation amongst audiences?
Learn how LLMs reshape brand perception and actionable steps organisations can take to maintain trust and reputation in the new information era.
Blog post
May 20, 2026If AI can’t find you, neither can your stakeholders
Why PR and comms teams need to take LLM visibility seriously — and what to do about it
The next time a journalist, investor or potential customer wants to know about your organisation, it’s now increasingly likely they won’t Google you. They’ll ask an AI.
They’ll type a question into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, something like “Who are the leading renewable energy companies in Australia?” or “What’s the best PR agency for healthcare in Singapore?” and the AI will give them an answer. The question is whether your own organisation shows up in that answer.
The implications are significant for communications professionals, whether they’re in the agency-side working with clients or in-house managing a brand. The rules of reputation and discovery are being rewritten, and there’s a new kind of playbook that we all need to adapt to. That’s what’s going to take us forward.
The shift no one saw coming, but perhaps should have
For decades, earned media has been the backbone of credibility. A strong piece in a respected outlet signalled trust, authority and relevance. This hasn’t particularly changed, but the way that coverage gets used has.
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of publicly available content – news articles, company websites, industry reports, social media, expert commentary. When someone asks an AI a question, it synthesises all of that material into a single answer. If an organisation has a strong, consistent, well-sourced presence across those channels, it is more likely to show up. If it doesn’t, it becomes invisible and is absent from the conversation entirely.
Gartner’s latest predictions for Chief Communications Officers underline how serious this shift is. They forecast that as LLMs increasingly replace traditional search, PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. What they say is that this is a communications challenge, one that requires PR expertise to build trust, secure quality coverage, and maintain consistent messaging across stakeholders.
Their research also predicts that by 2029, 45% of CCOs will be using narrative intelligence technologies to monitor reputation amid rising disinformation, a recognition that the old keyword-based approach to media monitoring simply can’t keep up with the way stories now form, spread and multiply.
The AI-generated content loop and why it matters
One of the less obvious risks in this new landscape is what happens when AI starts feeding on itself.
Catherine Arrow, Executive Director of the PR Knowledge Hub, raised this point during Isentia’s recent Inside the AI Shift webinar. As she explained, “AI can identify and interpret some publicly available commentary. The difficulty is that we have to be careful about what it is actually reading. You can already see this in AI overviews where the system may refer to online discussion without digging deeply enough into whether the original sources are genuine, reliable or themselves AI-generated. So we end up with AI nested inside AI, nested inside AI.”
That creates a real problem for anyone in communications. If the content landscape is increasingly populated by AI-generated material which is optimised to be found by algorithms rather than to inform real people, then the signals that LLMs rely on to build their answers become less trustworthy. Human judgement, original thinking and genuine expertise become harder for these systems to find, precisely because they’re being drowned out by content that was designed to game them.
Catherine puts it simply, “People can become immune to this kind of content because it does not sound like the way we speak to each other, nor does it reflect the way genuine relationships are built. Then, when conflict or outrage is layered on top, the environment becomes even harder to interpret.”
For PR and comms teams, it’s not enough to produce more content. The right content needs to be produced, one that is original, expert-led, and well-placed in the channels and formats that LLMs are most likely to surface.
What this means in practice
So what does it actually look like to build LLM visibility into your communications strategy? It starts with the fundamentals, but applied with new intent:
- Expert commentary placed in credible publications.
- Thought leadership that’s genuinely distinctive, not a rehash of what everyone else is saying.
- Consistent messaging across channels.
- Media coverage that’s authoritative enough for an AI system to treat it as a reliable source.
This is where the gap between media monitoring and media intelligence becomes critical. Monitoring tells you what’s been said. Intelligence tells you how stories are forming, which perspectives are shaping them, and where your organisation sits within those narratives — including how AI systems are representing you.
Dr Nici Sweaney, Founder and Director of AI Her Way, made this distinction sharply during Isentia’s AI as a New Stakeholder webinar. “What will set people apart, and what AI cannot replicate is the human lens. The judgment, the relationships, the institutional knowledge, the strategic read of a room. The organisations that lean into supporting their people to harness these tools, rather than just deploying the tools, will be the ones best placed.”
That’s an important framing. The answer to AI disruption is to get clear on what only humans can do and then make sure the tools we’re using actually support that.
Staying credible when the noise is deafening
There’s a temptation, when faced with a challenge like this, to throw more content at the problem – more posts, more articles, more releases. But Catherine Arrow points out the risks of that approach.
“Maintaining credibility and authenticity means being yourself and not allowing AI to suffocate your identity. That will become harder to do as digital twins, synthetic voices and other tools make it easier for organisations to use it as a mask. The real challenge is not so much maintaining credibility. It is about maintaining humanity, empathy, kindness and a genuine wish to connect with others beyond the AI-intermediated space.”
That advice matters just as much for organisations as it does for individuals. Brands that let AI do their thinking, generating bland, interchangeable content at scale, will find themselves blending into the noise rather than cutting through it. The brands that show up in LLM answers will be the ones with a clear, consistent, well-evidenced point of view.
Dr Nici Sweaney reinforced this from the operational side. “Ethical use is not about not using AI. It’s about using it with intention, honesty, and a clear sense of what good looks like on the other side.”
She was also direct about the risks of rushing in, “Don’t add new shiny AI projects on top of already overloaded teams. That creates resentment, not buy-in. Start by solving the problems people already have.”
The cultural dimension
There’s another layer to this that often gets overlooked and that’s the cultural one.
Catherine Arrow raised important concerns about how different AI systems can distort or flatten cultural context. Many of the most widely used models are shaped by US language, commercial assumptions and social norms. Chinese models operate within a different political and cultural framework. For organisations working across the Asia-Pacific region, it directly affects how the brand, messaging and the market are understood and represented by AI.
“Different AI systems may distort cultural context by privileging dominant languages, simplifying complex meanings, mistranslating concepts, omitting local histories or reproducing the worldview of their developers and training environments. They may flatten culture by making everything sound the same.”
For communicators operating across diverse markets, this means paying close attention to where content sits, who produced it, and whether the AI systems the audiences are using can actually interpret it with the nuance it deserves.
Where Isentia’s platform fits with its new toolkit for AI visibility
This is precisely the challenge that Isentia’s Lumina suite was built to address. Lumina is an intelligent suite of AI tools trained on the language, workflows and realities of modern public relations and communications, designed to empower, not replace, the human element of communications strategy.
Isentia’s Lumina AI View feature will allow organisations to track how their brand, competitors and key topics are described by leading LLMs, with auditable claims, citations and transparency with regards to the sources. It’s the difference between wondering whether AI is getting your story right and actually being able to see for yourself. These aren’t generic AI features bolted onto a monitoring tool. They’re intelligence systems built for the way communicators actually work.
The bottom line
The communications landscape has shifted. AI isn’t just a tool the team might use, it’s a stakeholder in its own right, actively shaping how an organisation is discovered, understood and evaluated.
For PR and comms professionals, the priorities are to ensure experts, commentary and evidence are placed widely enough for LLMs to find them and include them in their answers. Intelligence is imperative and required to how narratives are forming across both traditional media and AI platforms. All of this needs to be done without losing the human credibility that makes communications worth paying attention to in the first place.
As Dr Nici Sweaney put it, “The people who get the most from AI aren’t the ones who use the most tools, they’re the ones who understand their work deeply enough to know exactly where AI can add the most leverage.”
That’s the opportunity. The question is whether we’re set up to take it.
To explore how Isentia’s Lumina suite can help your team navigate AI visibility, get in touch or discover Lumina.
Content Marketing Executive, APAC
Nikita Gundala manages brand marketing and thought leadership for Pulsar Group across the SEA and ANZ markets. With over three years of first-hand experience in the influencer marketing and PR industries, she specializes in translating real-time insights and audience intelligence into actionable content. Nikita holds a master’s in Marketing and Digital from ESSEC Business School, Singapore. She has contributed to the wider industry conversation by co-authoring articles and reports for The Business Times Marketing Interactive.
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