Full Circle: How reputation building has returned to its pre-social media routes
Something profound has just happened to the way that professionals build their reputation and personal brand. It has a widespread impact on PR and how it is done.
AI has changed the way that PR professionals build their clients’ reputations, but in some ways nothing has changed. Citation and due diligence matter again, but the agents not for journalists.
Two data points tell you everything you need to know about the importance of PR expertise, and - for veterans like myself - will seem very quaint and nostalgic:
Gartner reports that PR budgets will double by 2027
Earned media drives 84% of AI citations
A quick ‘History of Comms’
For fifty years the PR profession was based on building and protecting reputation. While there were other important channels for doing this, what most clients paid for was press coverage.
Agency-side PR professionals built relationships with journalists based on trust, and then monetised those relationships by selling that influence to clients for the press coverage they could negotiate.
Then social media happened.
Suddenly the press wasn’t the only avenue for building awareness. By creating your own media, brands and individuals alike could quite affordably build their own networks and audiences. They could either do this for their own benefit, or use that power to sell influence.
PR as we knew it had changed, and many struggled to adapt.
In 2012 I wrote: “Why I quit traditional PR” as I resigned from my Corporate Communications job and went freelance to support senior executives’ social media profile.
It took a while to build that business, but as people began to understand the importance of a social media profile I collected more clients.
Today, a social media presence - especially on LinkedIn - is table stakes for professional reputation building and personal brand.
But about ten years ago, something else happened to this model: AI.
Instead of strength of argument or quality of reason, reach and engagement was defined by algorithms. Playing those algorithms became central to success.
This was the gamification of reputation - those who could play the algorithm achieved the greatest reach, regardless of the extent or veracity of their actual expertise. Chief executives received huge engagement from their thousands of reports; founders and influencers who understood the game relentlessly worked its numbers.
A new era of thought leadership
What has happened to the discipline of reputation building through the course of the last twenty years is that the arbiters of importance are AI agents, not journalists or algorithms.
Journalists always used to assign importance - in who they chose to interview or cite in trend analysis articles - based on their own assessment of the marketplace. In some ways this was driven by who paid for the most influential PR firms of lobbyists, but actually a lot of it was defined by their calculation of reality - market share, product success, unique or refreshing perspective.
In essence, journalists executed a process of due diligence to identify a hierarchy of significance.
Through the 21st century both search and social media algorithms rested power from journalists and while they still had a role, metrics unequivocally ruled: SEO keywords, engagement, impressions, clicks.
But 2025 saw a revolution in where this power resides. The digital spotlight has moved from "Search" and "Ranking" to "Retrieval", ushering in the era of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
To some extent the journalist’s power has been restored, twenty years later. They now play a role in influencing the retrievability of an individual. Commissioning by-lined articles, profile pieces, interviews as part of a trend analysis - this all contributes towards a generative search query response.
But obviously, the AI agent itself is now all-powerful in how it confers reputation based on how visible an individual is.
Crucially it ignores engagement. It ignores context-less keywords. It ignores post impressions.
It respects expertise and experience. It seeks corroboration. It hungers for validation.
How GEO changes the business of reputation building and management, how it defines thought leadership disciplines and how it impacts PR strategies is profound and seismic.