Right now, everyone’s talking about what you can do to get your brand mentioned in LLM responses.
After all, it’s the hottest thing in search — brand visibility is in.
But what people often aren’t talking about is what happens when your brand is mentioned, but the information is wrong or even damaging. What then?
Let’s talk about how AI models can harm brand reputation and what you can do about it if it’s happening to you.
How AI models can hurt your brand
We all know AI isn’t perfect, but sometimes that imperfection can be harmful to your brand. Here’s how AI models can hurt your brand:
Hallucinating information
One of the biggest issues with AI platforms, in general, is that they can hallucinate information. AI could fabricate information about your brand and make things up, which people then interpret as fact.
AI platforms can create offensive, incorrect, or biased responses that make your brand look bad and reflect poorly on your products or services. This can lead to a spread of misinformation, which can damage your brand and leave you scrambling to fix the problem.
Lack of consistency
When you ask the same question to different AI platforms, you’ll see differences in responses. In some cases, those responses could be negative towards your brand, depending upon the data and information that platform is trained on.
So, this lack of consistency can break trust with your audience. It can give them a negative impression of your brand if they’re using an AI model that doesn’t view your brand positively.
Fake sourcing
A running issue with AI platforms is that they often get citations wrong. These platforms have been known to completely miscite information and attribute it to the wrong website. Or, it cites the information to pages that don’t exist.
In both situations, it doesn’t always reflect poorly on the AI engine, but on you. For some people, they’re going to interpret it as your brand being incompetent or somehow trying to manipulate AI search engines to get citations.
You may find your brand in hot water if people think you’re being purposely deceptive (even though it’s on AI).
What to do if AI is harming your brand
If you’re currently seeing AI spread false information about your brand, here’s what you can do to resolve it:
1. Put the right information out there
If you’re finding that AI is completely making up information about your company, it’s because someone asked a question and the platform didn’t have anywhere to get the answer. AI will often hallucinate information when it doesn’t have a direct answer.
The best way to combat that is to be the direct answer. If there’s hallucinated information about your return policy, for example, create a page dedicated to how your returns work. Make sure you answer all possible questions someone could have.
That way, if people start asking that question again, AI has a source to pull the correct information from.
2. Always oversee any AI-generated content
If you’re using AI to help you generate content, always make sure you have a human overseeing it. Sometimes AI models can harm your brand reputation solely because you put out AI-generated content that wasn’t quite correct (and it wasn’t thoroughly reviewed). Don’t make more problems for yourself — always review the content created by AI engines.
Make sure the content you put out is factually correct and accurately represents your brand. This can help reduce issues with spreading false information.
3. Monitor what AI is saying about you
Continually monitoring what AI says about you is fundamental for getting ahead of AI hurting your brand. When you catch misinformation early, you can easily navigate around it and resolve the issue.
Keep tabs on your brand by searching for your company, products, or services on different AI platforms. You can ask these platforms what they know about you and see how they respond to queries related to your company.
If you spot any inaccuracies, you can quickly address them and get the right information out there.
4. Ensure consistent information across platforms
Inconsistencies are a big cause for AI misinterpreting things about your brand and giving contradictory information. You need to ensure that you’re providing consistent messaging around your brand.
If you’re saying one thing on social media and another on your website, it can make it confusing for AI platforms to know which is correct. That can lead to the wrong information getting shared, which creates confusion (especially if the information being shared is outdated).
Make sure you’re sending the same message across all platforms. Whether it’s your website, your social profiles, your press releases, or partner sites, make sure the information is all the same. That will limit AI from giving incorrect information.
5. Have a protocol in place for when brand damage happens
The best thing you can do, if you’re worried about AI harming your brand reputation, is to have an action plan in place for what you will do if AI shares brand-damaging information.
Having a well-established protocol ensures you’re ready if and when the time comes. You won’t be scrambling and panicking trying to figure out what to do — you can just take action.
When you’re building your protocol, establish things like:
- Who’s handling what
- Whether you need to create new content, do a PR release, etc.
- What you’re going to do for customers who may have seen that information
- What you can do to prevent this in the future
A strong protocol will help you handle any AI misinterpretations with ease.
Stay on top of what AI says about your brand
You don’t want AI to continue spreading false information about your brand, so it’s important you stay on top of it. You can use platforms like OmniSEO® to help you see what prompts your brand appears for, so you know where to look to see what AI is saying about you in its response.
But if you need more than that, consider investing in AI SEO services from an experienced agency. WebFX, the team behind SEO.com, can help you stay on top of, and actively monitor, your AI presence. From improving your brand visibility to tracking performance, we can help you do it all.
Connect with us today to see how we can help you evolve your AI search presence!
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