Next Generation Reputation Management: The Reckoning Artificial Intelligence Has Brought To PR
The reputation industry is facing a reckoning, and in the view of many inside it the moment is long overdue. PR and communications is a business worth many billions of dollars worldwide. Edelman, the largest independent firm, alone reported fee income of US$986m for 2024 in PRovoke Media’s global agency rankings. Yet much of that industry never understood the real source of its relevance. It is now discovering that it was living on borrowed time.
How the algorithm kept traditional PR relevant
Since the advent of Google, reputation has lived mostly in search, and in the databases that scrape it. Google’s algorithm worked on the basis of trust, and trust was easy to ascribe to mainstream media titles.
That created a paradox. As social media and pay per click advertising undermined the business models of print organisations, making it ever harder for them to earn money from advertising, their influence over reputation actually increased. Being mentioned by a major title had an immediate effect on what appeared on the first page of Google. For a company, a CEO, an ultra high net worth individual, a family business owner or the head of a family office, that first page was the primary reputation.
The economics followed. People working in PR now outnumber journalists by more than six to one, according to O’Dwyer’s, up from roughly two to one in 1980. A large industry grew up around access to a shrinking number of reporters.
It also meant spin still worked. When reputation was primarily mediated by what the news media said about an individual or a company, it was still possible for an agency to spin a story and decide what it wanted the ‘truth’ to be. The industry, across every discipline from crisis to profile building, did not realise the source of its continued relevance, even as the world went digital around it and algorithms took over.
Artificial intelligence is not new. The interface is
The reckoning has come from artificial intelligence. It is almost painful to watch long established firms hold seminars on the subject as though the technology were new, a kind of alchemy whose risks and opportunities have only just appeared.
The record says otherwise. Google brought RankBrain, a machine learning system, into its search results in 2015, more than a decade ago. What was missing was an interface that put artificial intelligence in the hands of everyone. ChatGPT supplied it in November 2022, and OpenAI has since reported more than 900 million weekly active users.
Peter Diamandis’s Six Ds of exponentials describe the pattern: a technology spends years in a deceptive phase, growing quietly, before it becomes disruptive. The accessible interface was the point at which artificial intelligence moved from one phase to the next. Its arrival was visible for a long time. The firms that declined to adapt, and kept selling the same legacy services, are the ones now facing the hardest reckoning.
From trust to verification
The problem, for the old model, is that artificial intelligence has the ability to verify. It does not need to ascribe trust in the same way.
Reputation no longer manifests in a single piece of media. It manifests across hundreds, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of data points: videos, comments, online chatter, blogs, podcast appearances, owned channels and structured data, alongside a far larger and more democratised landscape of specialist outlets and websites. When Michael Macfarlane Associates runs its reputation intelligence analysis for a client, a single run can draw in hundreds of thousands of data points once the comments and conversation around each piece of content are counted, and some of that content is created several times a day. In the world of artificial intelligence, social media is no longer social. It is just media.
The data shows how quickly attention is moving away from the traditional page of links. In a Pew Research Center study of almost 69,000 Google searches, users who saw an artificial intelligence summary clicked a conventional result 8 per cent of the time, against 15 per cent when no summary appeared. They clicked a source link inside the summary just 1 per cent of the time. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, covering 48 markets, found that social media and video networks are now more widely used for news than television, and that 10 per cent of people use artificial intelligence chatbots for news each week, rising to 17 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds.
The consequence is stark. Practitioners who still manage reputation only through traditional media are working with perhaps less than 10 per cent of the tools and opportunity available to them.
The advantage for those who move first
For clients, that gap is an opportunity. When a rival, an adversary or a benchmark competitor is still working with a legacy agency on a media first approach, they are paying an opportunity cost they may not see. A single story in a major title is no longer enough, on its own, to shape the information environment, because that environment now looks for verification.
Business leaders, CEOs, family business owners and family office leaders now need to behave almost like influencers: appearing across platforms, creating content consistently and adding genuine, authoritative and verifiable substance about who they are and what they stand for. Done well, the advantage is significant. It can support better valuations, shape global sentiment and affinity, surface deals and opportunities, and build resilience against crises.
Low profile is no longer protection
Resilience matters because reputation can now be weaponised with ease. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe global risk over the next two years.
This is especially relevant to family businesses and conglomerates, a sector of real scale: the world’s 500 largest family businesses generate around US$8 trillion in revenue and employ more than 24 million people, according to the EY and University of St. Gallen Family Business Index. Many were built by parents or grandparents on the principle of keeping a low profile, or none at all, and focusing on the business. Today a seemingly innocuous event in one company can spread immediately to the reputation of the whole family, whether the family likes it or not. Silence leaves the information environment to others.
That is why next generation reputation management is an imperative rather than an option. To manage reputation only through conventional media sources and media relationships is to expose a client to significant risk, and to miss a significant opportunity to build value and to secure frictionless global outcomes.
A reputation without borders
The global point matters. Artificial intelligence does not distinguish between borders, and increasingly it does not distinguish between languages. The same substance can inform how a family or a company is understood in London, Hong Kong, Dubai and Mumbai at once. That makes it possible to build a reputation on a truly global basis, and then to build opportunities and outcomes from that platform.
What next generation agencies should be doing
All of this should make PR and communications more important than ever. Instead, many legacy players remain wedded to the old ways: boasting about their media relationships and building strategies that depend entirely on media intermediation. Their clients are missing the opportunity.
Artificial intelligence is not only a way to maximise efficiency. It is a way to bring new levels of creativity to the design of solutions and outcomes for clients. Know how and capital matter as much as they ever have. But know how and capital without a contemporary reputation, managed in a next generation way, carry a large opportunity cost and a great deal of unmanaged risk. For a family, a family business, a family office or an enterprise, it can be one of the largest unmanaged risks of all.
That is where the PR and communications industry has failed to change. It is not enabling clients to get where they want to go in the age of artificial intelligence. But for the next generation agencies that have adapted, the opportunity is immense.
Michael Macfarlane Associates applies next generation reputation management to private clients, families and enterprises, and to the capital outcomes that depend on them.