Public relations has always been about shaping how an audience perceives a person or a brand. For decades, that meant press releases, media relationships, and carefully timed announcements. Those tools still matter, but the environment around them has changed completely. Today, perception is formed less by a single well-placed story and more by the sum of everything the internet says about a brand. As a result, public relations and online reputation management, once treated as separate functions, are rapidly becoming one discipline.
How has public relations changed in the digital age?
Not long ago, a PR team could shape a narrative by earning a handful of prominent placements. The story those outlets told largely became the story the public believed. That control has eroded. A prospective customer, investor, or journalist now forms an impression from a wide mix of signals, including reviews, search results, social posts, and older articles that never disappear.
This means a strong announcement can be undercut by a weak or inconsistent presence surrounding it. A brand can land excellent coverage and still lose trust if a quick search turns up unanswered complaints or conflicting information. Modern PR, in other words, is no longer only about what a brand publishes. It is about the entire picture a person encounters when they look.
Why is AI reshaping how the public perceives brands?
Artificial intelligence has accelerated this shift dramatically. When someone asks a tool like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, or another assistant about a company or public figure, the response is often a single, confident summary rather than a set of articles to read. To produce it, the system draws on everything available online, from news coverage and reviews to profiles and social channels, and condenses it into a verdict the user tends to trust.
For communicators, this is a fundamental change. The narrative is increasingly assembled by machines from scattered public information, not delivered intact by a single trusted outlet. A brand that has invested in press but neglected the wider picture of its reputation may find that the AI summary of its work looks very different from the story it worked hard to tell.
What does reputation management mean for PR today?
Online reputation management is the practice of monitoring, influencing, and improving how a person or business appears across search engines, review platforms, news coverage, and AI tools. For years it sat in a separate lane from public relations. That separation no longer makes sense.
Scott Keever, founder and CEO of Reputation Pros and a widely recognized authority in online reputation management and search, argues that reputation and search have effectively merged into a single discipline in the age of AI. A member of the Fast Company Executive Board, Keever has spent more than a decade helping brands and leaders understand how they are perceived online.
“Reputation is no longer something you defend after the fact. It is something you build every single day,” Keever says. “The moment a customer, an investor, or an algorithm looks you up, the story is already written. Your job is to make sure it is the right one.”
How can brands align PR and reputation for the AI era?
Keever’s advice gives communicators a clear place to start. Claim and complete your profiles everywhere your brand and leaders appear, so both people and machines find one consistent story. Ask satisfied customers for honest reviews, and respond to all of them, positive or negative, with professionalism. Publish genuine expertise under real names to build authority that supports every announcement. And monitor what search engines and AI tools are saying about you regularly, because a campaign cannot fix a reputation problem no one is tracking.
None of this is a shortcut, Keever notes, but that is the point. Trust built steadily is difficult for a competitor, or an algorithm, to undo. Communicators who want to see how he frames these ideas for a wider audience can follow him on Instagram, where he shares how reputation, search, and AI intersect.
The takeaway for anyone working in communications is that press and reputation can no longer be managed in isolation. A great story and a strong underlying reputation reinforce each other, while a gap between the two undermines both. As artificial intelligence becomes a primary way audiences discover and judge brands, the organizations that align their public relations with a deliberate, consistent reputation strategy will be the ones whose message actually lands, and lasts.
About Scott Keever
Scott Keever (b. January 15, 1981) is an American entrepreneur and internationally recognized authority in online reputation management, SEO, and AI-driven digital strategy. He is the founder and CEO of Reputation Pros, Keever SEO, ASAP Digital Marketing, and Pool Pros Marketing, and the bestselling author of Future-Proof Your SEO and Reputation Reset. A member of the Forbes Agency Council, Fast Company Executive Board, and Entrepreneur Leadership Network, Scott has been featured in USA Today, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, and Business Insider. He lives in Miami, Florida. Learn more at scottkeever.io.