Brands that dominate Google search are often missing from AI answers, a gap that’s reshaping what businesses expect from top online reputation management firms.
Two months after launching AIOverview.com, TheBestReputation is noticing a consistent pattern: many businesses that rank well on Google are nearly invisible in the AI answers that now sit above those results.
The tool showed people the problem was real. What surprised us was how common it is,”
— Chris Hinman
The free tool, released in May, scores how five major AI systems describe a brand, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews. Since then, the firm has seen established, well-known brands score low, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their website.
The wider research points the same way. Roughly 73 percent of the pages that reach Google’s first page are never cited in AI-generated summaries, according to Onely, and more than a quarter of Google searches now return one of those summaries. A brand can earn the top spot on search and still be left out of the answer a customer actually reads.
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“The tool showed people the problem was real. What surprised us was how common it is,” said Chris Hinman, CEO of TheBestReputation. “A business can have a great website and still be described poorly by a chatbot, simply because the AI learned someone else’s version of the story first.”
For years, online reputation management meant one thing: keeping the right results on the first page of Google. That work still matters, but it is no longer the whole job. As companies weigh the best online reputation management companies to work with, many are now asking a different question, whether a firm can shape what an AI model says about them.
“Knowing what AI says about you is the easy part,” said Rida Kamal, who leads client work at TheBestReputation. “Changing it is where the real effort goes, and that is what our clients are focused on now.”
The tool is free at aioverview.com, and TheBestReputation offers full optimization services for brands that want to improve what the AI engines find. More information is at thebestreputation.com/ai-overview.
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