The Evolution of Search, PR, and Reputation Management 

A short history, with some thoughts on the future

TLDR: The changing Search landscape – from simply compiling results to attempting to give searchers the essence of a brand – requires those managing reputations to keep up with emerging tech to best serve their clients. AI is the latest destination in this journey.

 

In recent years, the field of Public Relations has undergone a significant transformation, evolving so that it now emphasizes building reputation as an overarching goal. PR stresses reputation because it goes beyond what a brand sells or how they came to be, it’s who the brand is. The same is true for individuals. While people often want to be known for their accomplishments and thought leadership – the ultimate goal is the desired reputation – who they are.

The Changing Nature of Reputation

Before mass media, reputation was primarily shaped by word-of-mouth and direct experiences. However, as the world became more interconnected and complex, we found ourselves interested in companies, brands, and people that we couldn’t personally interact with or judge for ourselves. This change led to the development of new, more sophisticated ways to assess reputation.

For decades, traditional media played a crucial role in shaping public opinion about brands and individuals. This meant that companies could influence their reputation by smartly influencing or buying media coverage – a practice that continues to this day, albeit in different forms.

The Internet Revolution

The advent of the internet brought about a seismic shift in how reputations are formed and managed. It created a vast array of potential sources for people to draw upon when seeking to understand what a brand or individual is really about. This digital landscape meant that many different actors could impact reputation. It also offered brands and individuals many opportunities to influence what people read and think about them.

The Role of Search Engines

Search engines immediately played a pivotal role in this new digital reputation ecosystem. Early search engines like Yahoo were primarily focused on directing users to specific websites. Over time, especially as Google came on the scene, they evolved to help users find specific pieces of information or answers to queries.

For the past 20 years, search engines have generally been keyword-based rather than intent-based, meaning they don’t  understand complex queries. They provide a set of potentially interesting results based on the keywords entered. For instance, if you type “McDonald’s,” the search engine can’t reliably know whether you want company information, financial data, or directions to the nearest restaurant.

In recent years, search engines have become increasingly sophisticated. They’ve gotten better at understanding user intent and providing more relevant results. They can see the device you are using, your location, your search history, etc. They can now also better satisfy more searchers by offering a variety of potentially relevant pages, sites, and other content, and then allow you to choose your own path. For a brand search, you’ll typically see the corporate website at the top, followed by sources like Wikipedia, financial information, social media profiles, news articles, and job listings. For individuals, you might see more pictures, information about family, and often details about their financial situation.(This is much easier to see using our proprietary IMPACT tracking and analysis platform.)

Key developments in search evolution:

1. Traditional Search Engines (1990s): Keyword-based, limited understanding of context.
2. Google Dominance (2000s): Advanced algorithms, PageRank, more relevant results.
3. Semantic Search (2010s): Better understanding of user intent and context.
4. AI-powered Search (2020s): Conversational, context-aware, synthesizing information from multiple sources.

Search engines are constantly self-optimizing to satisfy the maximum number of users. If people stop clicking on Bloomberg profiles, Google won’t prioritize them as prominently for companies and executives. As new platforms like TikTok gain popularity, search algorithms quickly find ways to integrate their  content into search results.

Google: The Accidental Reputation Snapshot Machine

In this effort to provide a variety of sources to satisfy searchers, Google has inadvertently created a powerful tool for assessing digital reputation. Understanding an entity’s reputation requires bringing together various perspectives – what the entity says about itself, what the media reports, what experts think, what peers say, what consumers experience, and what the general public believes. These are largely the same inputs that Google uses to populate its search results.

As a result, Google search results have become perhaps the most efficient way to get a representative snapshot of an entity’s reputation. They provide facts about what an entity has done and is doing now, as well as what various stakeholders think and say about it.

The Wikipedia Factor

Alongside search engines, Wikipedia has emerged as a significant source of reputation information. Wikipedia aims to include topics of consequence in their live, crowd-sourced encyclopedia, with facts determined and agreed upon by a community of editors following a set of guidelines. Earned media from reliable sources tends to be the most accepted sources for populating information on Wikipedia.

The influence of Wikipedia extends beyond its own platform. Search engines like Google and Bing rely heavily on Wikipedia to determine notability of an entity. In essence, having a Wikipedia page has become a marker of notability. Wikipedia often features prominently in Google and Bing search results, including in knowledge panels for branded searches.

Tracking Wikipedia edits (and suspected vandalism) became essential to managing a brand, which was why we developed WikiAlerts.  

The Imperative of Digital Reputation Management

If a desirable reputation is an important goal, it is crucial for brands to monitor their various online platforms, work to optimize different types of sites and content, and proactively build a more ideal online presence. Companies invest in their digital reputation to accomplish specific goals – increase sales, attract desirable staff, impress partners, influence the media – and sometimes to satisfy ego needs.

Improving a non-ideal reputation can involve crowding out unfavorable content or focusing on ideal content that directly or indirectly answers the types of questions people want to know. Monitoring Google and other key platforms like Wikipedia is essential, as it allows entities to see what stakeholders are seeing and helps map out areas for improvement.

Strategies for Reputation Improvement

Clients most often become concerned with their search presence when there is content that they don’t want to see. Their focus is therefore primarily on what they want to remove. Improvement to digital reputation can come in several ways:

• Getting a page or site removed
• Getting a piece of content changed or updated
• Demoting unwanted content
• Generating and promoting new desirable content

Determining the best approach requires expertise and experience. Many service providers develop and use a single set of tactics applied across all clients, often relying on specific tricks or optimizations they’ve developed. These companies are often focused primarily on demoting unfavorable content rather than building an ideal online presence.

The Five Blocks Approach

Our company, Five Blocks, uses a different approach to both meet the client’s short-term need to address negatives or solve specific issues, while also working to enhance the entity’s digital reputation for the long term. Our focus is on building the ideal online presence that covers who a brand is or aspires to be, based on a variety of perspectives. This strategy follows the logic that Search has become not simply a collection of random results, but a way to see your company or executives holistically. Using proprietary technology, the company performs peer analyses to surface opportunities – types of content or pages that appear prominently for peers and may therefore also suggest opportunities for the client.

Our data-centric approach, facilitated by our technology, means we track and analyze how entities are represented in various languages and locations, as well as the differences that we see depending on the keyword searched.

The AI Revolution

The emergence of AI models like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and others has ushered in a new era in reputation management. These AI models can do things that Google alone cannot:

• Understand more complex or nuanced queries
• Read the content of web pages and extract answers directly
• Synthesize information gleaned from various sources
• Formulate responses that directly address the query
• Provide results in specific requested formats

In an AI-powered world, we expect people to ask more complex questions to get directly to their desired outcomes. Of course, AIs will need to evolve to provide trusted (verified) answers, and we are already seeing this begin to happen. While Google-type searching is likely to persist alongside smarter AI-powered searches, brands and executives will soon find that their reputation lives both in Google and in the “brains” of a small number of very influential AIs.

The Power and Peril of AI Perceptions

What each of these AIs thinks about your brand can be critical. For example, when queried with a specific question about the two candidates for U.S. president, while many AIs declined to answer, Gemini consistently reported that one candidate was not a good man, while the other was. As AIs gain more influence, their perceptions about a brand or executive may become the most influential voice impacting decisions on topics ranging from how good a singer someone is, to who should be the president.

This is just one small example of how the pervasive use and de facto acceptance of AI will come with potentially far-reaching consequences. Changing the system will be very difficult – early attempts to slow down the development of smarter generative AI models do not seem to have been effective.

Shaping AI Perceptions

Currently the best option is to help shape what the AI models are saying about you, your brand, or the topics that are important to you. To do this, you first need to know what they are currently saying. This includes understanding the facts the AI models present, the topics they mention related to your entity, and the sources they return in support of their answers.  You’ll also want to track unfavorable content that is being returned. 

It will be important to see how each of these is changing over time – are they the same as before, getting better, or getting worse? It will be instructive to compare with peers – do they get the same treatment? Perhaps the AIs are not aware of some of your content or facts, or maybe they are outdated or have confused the entity with another similarly named one.

Years ago Five Blocks developed our IMPACT tracking and analysis platform, focused on Google searches. Since then we have been adapting our own capabilities to better serve clients, and will soon be launching a new platform, AIQ to address the new challenges AI Search presents.

AIQ provides a useful snapshot of how your brand is being seen by AIs. It also shows you trends – the topics and sources gaining prominent, versus those that are waning. 

PR firms and their clients can use this information to chart a course that will help shape AI’s understanding of the entity, giving clients more control over how they are perceived.

Where we go from here

As the world of search continues to evolve with the rise of AI, it is advisable for brands and individuals to stay ahead of the curve. By understanding how they’re perceived not just in traditional search engines like Google, but also by AI models, clients can take proactive steps to shape their digital reputation and maintain control over their narrative in this new frontier of information.