Your reputation is now an AI answer: managing trust, risk and sustainability in the age of generative search

If you don’t read any other ERM MCA blog post this year, read this one. It has huge implications for your business. 

Annie Longsworth and I presented during Climate Week NYC on an issue we think most companies and brands haven’t caught on to yet: AI is now deciding what story to tell about your sustainability efforts. 

Here’s why that matters: 

• A Bain-Dynata survey found that 80% of consumers rely on “zero click” search results at least 40% of the time. This means that people searching about your company’s sustainability efforts often take an AI summary at face value and don’t click through to your website, social media posts, sustainability report or new research study. These are the kinds of scenarios I’m talking about: 
  • A prospective investor asks ChatGPT how a potential portfolio company is progressing toward its climate commitments. 
  • A procurement leader asks Microsoft Copilot whether a supplier's sustainability claims are credible. 
  • A journalist asks Gemini how a company's sustainability performance stacks up against its competitors. 
• According to Muck Rack’s “What is AI Reading?” report, about 84% of the information AI cites comes from earned media — everything from stories written by traditional journalists to comments made on Reddit.  
  • AI is pulling from these sources at a moment when many companies have fully embraced greenhushing. AI can’t pull from coverage that doesn’t exist.
• The same Muck Rack study found about 14% of the information AI cites comes from owned media — such as your sustainability report, corporate blogs and website. But AI often can’t interpret or read what is in a sustainability report based on how they are written today. You want AI to pull from your story, so you have to rework your sustainability report to be easily searchable by AI. Methods for this include: 
  
  • Target question-based queries (Like "How does," "What is," "Best way to," especially with declarative language, i.e. “XYZ Company is…”)  
    • That means moving from this: “We remain committed to reducing our environmental footprint through operational improvements, renewable energy investments and ongoing efficiency initiatives. ” To this: “We reduced Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 18% between 2021 and 2025 through renewable electricity procurement and energy efficiency upgrades. ” 
  • Incorporate AI-driven user prompts and questions into headlines, and leverage them within FAQs. 
  • Create highly structured content with headers, bulleted takeaways and tables. 
  • Include comparisons, tables, statistics, citations and testimonials. 
  • Link to authoritative references (e.g. white papers, media coverage) to show you're part of the knowledge graph. 
  • Use descriptive file names and alt text with traditional search engine keywords for images. 

Bottom line, rather than simply repeating information, AI synthesizes and interprets it, creating narratives that can influence public perception. This presents new challenges as sustainability-related topics such as PFAS, microplastics, water use, data centers, and climate impacts attract growing scrutiny and become interconnected through AI-generated insights. 

So how can you best manage this — and manage it before AI serves up incorrect, damaging stories about your organization that then runs away from you? Generally, use an AI-powered reputation intelligence approach to monitor emerging issues, gauge stakeholder sentiment, identify gaps between performance and perception, and proactively manage trust. Specifically, follow the approach led by our new Earned Media capability: 

• Identify and track the queries being made about your company through all AI search engines (because each one pulls from different sources and serves up different summaries). 
• Earn credibility through earned media — because that is where 84% of the citations come from. 
• Build discoverability through owned media — because a report the machine cannot read produces nothing. 
• And influence stakeholders, including AI, through thought leadership — because the answers being written about you tomorrow are being sourced today. 

For a little more context and color on this, click here to see Annie and I talking about this topic, recorded during New York Climate Week: [INSERT LINK]