What Is AI Saying About Your Brand—And Is It Right?

Why It Matters

Because AI agents now shape consumer perception and can even execute purchases, brands that fail to manage their AI‑generated narrative risk misinformation, lost market share, and diminished brand equity.

Key Takeaways

• Gen Z and Millennials increasingly rely on LLMs for product research
• Panora found AI model descriptions often inaccurate or incomplete for brands
• Introduced “share of model” metric to monitor AI brand mentions
• Iterative copy adjustments improved AI-generated brand representations across platforms
• Optimizing for AI agents now rivals traditional SEO strategies

Summary

The video examines how artificial‑intelligence agents are becoming the next point of contact for consumers and why brands must now monitor the way large language models describe them. Panora, the owner of brands such as Absolute, Jameson and Valentine’s, discovered that a majority of Gen Z and over half of millennials already turn to LLMs for product research.

Their audit revealed that AI‑generated answers were often incomplete, inaccurate, and sometimes outright wrong—one model even called the affordable mass‑market Scotch Valentine’s a prestige product. To quantify exposure, Panora created a “share of model” metric that tracks how frequently and favorably a brand appears in AI responses compared with competitors.

Armed with that data, the company began prompting major models, cataloguing the outputs, and systematically tweaking website copy and advertising language to align with the phrasing that AI prefers. Pam Cart, Panora’s chief marketing officer, emphasized that this iterative process turned a messy AI narrative into a controlled brand story.

The initiative signals a broader industry shift: after two decades of SEO optimization, marketers now must optimize for AI across three emerging interaction modes—independent consumer agents, owned brand agents, and fully autonomous AI systems capable of completing transactions. Brands that ignore their AI representation risk mis‑representation and lost sales in an increasingly AI‑mediated marketplace.

Original Description

As more consumers use AI to research products, a new question is emerging for brands: What are these systems saying about us?

Pernod Ricard tested the major AI models and found the answers were sometimes incomplete or incorrect. Here’s what they did—and what leaders can learn from it.

Read the full article here: https://s.hbr.org/3NyE68R