Your reputation is already being shaped – with or without your input.
Every search for your brand tells a story. Whether it’s a glowing review on a niche industry site, a news article highlighting a misstep, or a mention in a peer’s LinkedIn post, your brand’s reputation is forming in real time – and not always in ways you control.
The reality is simple: if you’re not actively managing your online brand reputation, others (including your competitors) will. And in today’s digital-first world, perception is as important as reality. Maintaining your brand reputation is no longer an added extra – it’s an integral part of any search strategy.
Why brand reputation lives in the SERPs
Search engines have always influenced brand perception. What has changed is how quickly and comprehensively they now shape it.
Users no longer rely solely on brand websites to learn about companies. Instead, they encounter a blend of sources, including:
- AI-generated summaries
- Comparison articles
- Review platforms
- Editorial media coverage
- Social discussions and forums
Google’s AI Overviews, which now appear in a large share of search results, synthesise information from across the web to present an instant narrative about a company or product.
This means a user can form a strong opinion about a brand without ever visiting its website.
Traditional search results still matter. But they now coexist with AI-driven summaries, chat interfaces, and recommendation engines that prioritise credible third-party signals and structured content.
In other words, your brand’s reputation online is shaped not just by what you publish, but by what the entire web says about you.
Let’s look at an example of this…
We recently onboarded a new client at Digitaloft, with a product that operates in a very competitive market. As such, some of the highest volume keywords were along the lines of “[brand] vs [competitor]”. However, a quick Google search for that keyword returned a one-sided AI overview, guided almost exclusively by their competitor’s site, which housed landing pages that directly compared them (always favourably) to their key competitors.
The narrative around our client’s brand was shaped largely by their competitors.
And this isn’t isolated.
If a customer looking for information about the meal prep company Simmer Eats wanted to compare the product vs competitors, they would find recommendations for competitors and an AI overview driven by Frive’s on-site content.
One of our key priorities was to begin proactively rewriting this narrative in our client’s own words. We recommended dedicated comparison and explainer pages that positioned the client alongside competitors, ensuring balanced information was available for both users and AI systems.
The limits of traditional reputation management
PR teams have long been tasked with defending brands – responding to crises, issuing statements, and managing media relationships. But this reactive approach has its limits.
Without integration into organic search, these efforts are like shouting into a void. Your press release may exist, but if it isn’t discoverable where decision-makers search, it won’t shape perception. Integrating proactive SEO bridges this gap, ensuring positive narratives appear where audiences actually look and influencing perception before negative content takes hold.
Tactics for using SEO to actively shape brand perception
SEO is no longer just about traffic – it’s a tool for reputation control. Key tactics include:
1. Understanding and claiming all branded keywords
Reputation management begins with understanding exactly how audiences search for your brand.
Many organisations overlook common branded queries such as:
- “[brand] reviews”
- “[brand] pricing”
- “[brand] alternatives”
- “[brand] vs competitor”
When these searches are left unaddressed, review sites, affiliates, or competitors often dominate them.
Creating high-quality pages that address these queries allows brands to control the narrative, capture valuable traffic, and ensure that accurate information appears in search results.
2. Prioritising content depth and quality
Search engines reward content that provides depth, clarity, and usefulness.
For reputation management, this means producing content that directly addresses the questions audiences are already asking.
Insights from community platforms such as Reddit, industry forums, and social media discussions can reveal common concerns, misconceptions, or comparisons people make when evaluating brands.
Incorporating these insights into FAQs, product pages, and thought leadership content helps ensure that brand messaging aligns with real audience questions.
3. Ensuring consistency across touchpoints
Modern search doesn’t just rely on your on-site content. You can’t be the only one shouting about how great your products are. Ensure your messaging and tone are uniform across all channels, from website to social media to third-party profiles. This brand positioning and storytelling should also permeate through off-site digital PR coverage, creating that consistency that AI search relies on.
4. Demonstrating E-E-A-T
Search engines increasingly prioritise content that demonstrates expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Brands can strengthen these signals through:
- Expert authorship and executive commentary
- Credible citations and research
- Authoritative backlinks from trusted publications
- Transparent company and author information
These signals help search engines and AI systems identify reliable sources when summarising or recommending brands.
Interested in E-E-A-T? Read James Brockbank’s expert guide to learn everything you need to know.
5. Structuring content for modern discovery channels
Like it or loathe it, search now extends beyond traditional results pages. Yes, I’m talking about ChatGPT, AI Overviews, social platforms, and other non-traditional spaces.
AI assistants, answer engines, and recommendation systems rely heavily on structured, well-organised content.
Brands should ensure that pages are:
- Clearly structured with logical headings
- Supported by schema markup where appropriate
- Written in clear, accessible language
- Supported by concise FAQs and summaries
In truth, these are tactics that should be present across your website’s content, regardless of whether you’re focused on elevating your presence in AI search.
The role of digital PR in SEO-led reputation management
Digital PR’s role in reputation management isn’t a new concept. For a long time, online reputation management has been a cornerstone of digital PR briefs, with strategies geared to build new narratives around brands – often of authority and expertise.
While reputation management may be seen as a more traditional PR activity, digital PR does so in a way that ensures maximum online visibility. By earning high-authority backlinks, media coverage, and social signals, digital PR is a powerful tool in shaping online perception of brands – for search engines, LLMs, and most importantly, customers. Every article, podcast mention, or analyst quote can reinforce the story you want searchers to see.
Digital reputation management should be a pillar of modern digital PR strategies, and we should see tactics such as expert commentary come to the forefront, giving brands the opportunity not only to shape their brand narrative but also to influence wider industry conversations.
Common reputation risks in search
Many organisations underestimate how easily negative or misleading narratives can take hold online.
Common reputation risks include:
- Competitor comparison pages that are dominating brand searches
- Affiliate “best alternatives” articles ranking highly
- Outdated media coverage that is defining brand perception
- Review platforms appearing above official brand content
- Forum discussions or social threads ranking prominently
Without proactive SEO and digital PR strategies, these narratives can persist for years.
The most effective reputation management strategies identify these risks early and address them before they become entrenched in search results.
Tips for building a robust brand narrative in organic search
Building and protecting your brand’s digital footprint is key here. To effectively build a strong brand narrative that you’re in control of, make sure you:
- Map your narrative across the funnel – Address awareness, consideration, and loyalty stages in your content. Do potential customers use Google to compare you to your competitors? What are the common pain points users have before they’ve found you? Make sure your brand has a voice across all of these areas. Ahrefs recently found that “Best X” blog lists make up 43.8% of all page types cited in ChatGPT responses, so ensuring your brand is present in these is vital.
- Highlight differentiators – Ensure your unique value propositions are clearly conveyed in meta descriptions and headlines, encouraging clicks through to your site and making the most of Google’s NavBoost. If you’re in a saturated market, consider creating content on-site that clearly compares your product vs the competition.
- Humanise your brand – Executive thought leadership, customer stories, and case studies resonate with both audiences and search engines. These all display the vital E-E-A-T signals that win over potential customers and build a brand perception that sticks.
How to measure brand reputation
Quantifying reputation impact isn’t guesswork. Like any element of an SEO strategy – if it’s a priority, it should be measured. While “brand sentiment” can be measured in a variety of ways, common metrics include:
- Branded search volume – Are more people searching for your brand than previously?
- Branded SERP comparison over time – Track which messages dominate search results for your brand terms. How many of the pages in Google’s top 10 have you had influence on?
- AI visibility and mentions – How often is your brand being recommended by LLMs and Google’s AI mode? Are you seen as a trusted brand?
- Branded traffic percentages – Evaluate how much search traffic is coming specifically from branded queries.
- Sentiment and coverage quality – Not all mentions are equal; high-authority positive placements outweigh generic mentions. You can scrape Reddit or social media threads for sentiment, or analyse overall sentiment from ChatGPT or SERPs.
These metrics provide a clear picture of both perception and overall visibility, informing future strategic decisions.
What CMOs should be thinking about
For senior leaders, the key question is no longer whether SEO influences reputation.
It is whether the organisation is actively shaping that influence.
My advice is to consider:
- Are we actively shaping branded search results, or merely reacting?
- Which third-party sites are defining our credibility today?
- Where are competitors controlling narratives we’ve overlooked?
Being proactive in SEO-led reputation management allows CMOs to influence perception before crises arise, and to reclaim authority in search results where it matters most.
What’s next?
Brand reputation management is no longer a side activity – it’s central to business strategy. SEO and digital PR are essential levers for shaping perception, building trust, and ensuring that the story searchers see aligns with the story you want to tell.
For CMOs and brand leaders ready to take control of their online narrative, the question isn’t if you should integrate SEO into reputation management – it’s how quickly you can start.