Right now, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini have a description of your brand stored in their parameters. They'll share it with anyone who asks. You probably have no idea what it says. It might describe you accurately at your best. It might describe you as you were three years ago, before your last product pivot. It might associate you with a weakness your competitors have been pushing in their content. Or it might barely mention you at all.
LLMs develop mental models of brands through the aggregate of everything the internet has said about you, weighted by source authority, citation frequency, and topic recency. This isn't a neutral archive. It's a constructed narrative — shaped by your owned content, your competitors' comparative content, customer reviews, analyst coverage, news mentions, and everything in between.
The entity associations your brand has accumulated over time are the lens through which LLMs interpret and describe you. If you've been consistently described as "affordable but limited" in comparison articles, that framing embeds. If your most prominent third-party mentions are from three years ago when your product looked different, that's the version the model knows best. If your category competitors have been publishing deliberate comparison content designed to position you unfavourably, those signals accumulate in the model's representation of you.
Brand narrative management used to mean press releases, journalist relationships, and crisis communications. In the AI era, it means systematic signal management — controlling what the AI layer knows about you, how it knows it, and from what sources.
The uncomfortable reality: The AI's opinion of your brand was formed without your input. It may be accurate, partially accurate, or significantly off. You can influence it — but only if you invest in the strategy to do so.
Before you can reposition your brand in AI's mental model, you need to know where it currently sits. The brand accuracy audit is the starting point, and it's more accessible than most teams assume.
Start by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini a series of direct questions about your brand: "What is [Brand Name] and what does it do?" "Who is [Brand Name] best suited for?" "How does [Brand Name] compare to [Competitor A] and [Competitor B]?" "What are [Brand Name]'s main strengths and weaknesses?"
Document the answers. Compare them against your current brand positioning. Note the gaps, the outdated descriptions, the associations you'd prefer to change, and the competitor framings that appear when your brand comes up. This is your baseline — the AI's current mental model of you, in its own words.
Repositioning AI's mental model of your brand is achievable, but it requires patience and systematic effort. LLMs don't update instantly. The signals you introduce today will influence model behaviour over weeks and months — not overnight.
The toolkit has four components: structured content that establishes specific brand attributes; narrative-forward case studies that demonstrate those attributes in real-world contexts; expert commentary that reinforces key positioning from credible individual voices; and third-party citations that corroborate the brand story you want to own.
"You can't change the AI's opinion of your brand with a press release. You change it by consistently introducing better, more credible, more specific signals than the ones currently shaping its narrative."
Specifically: if the AI currently describes you in generic terms, publish content that makes your differentiators explicitly citable. If it's using outdated positioning, create new content that documents your current capabilities and earns editorial coverage in credible publications that will update the model's training signals. If competitors are shaping your narrative, counter with your own authoritative comparison content — accurate, fair, and built to be cited.
The important shift in mindset is from periodic to continuous. Traditional brand management had clear projects: a rebranding initiative, an annual brand refresh, a campaign to address a PR issue. Each was bounded in time and scope.
AI brand narrative management doesn't have those boundaries. LLMs update periodically, but new training signals are continuously being indexed. A competitor publishes a comparison piece in a high-authority publication — it starts influencing the model within weeks. A negative product review gains traction on a well-trafficked review platform — it becomes part of the model's understanding of your weaknesses. A major customer success story earns editorial coverage — it gradually shifts the model's description in a more favourable direction.
Repositioning AI's mental model takes time — typically weeks to months of consistent signal investment. But the effect, once established, is deeply durable. An AI narrative that describes your brand accurately and favourably, corroborated by credible third parties, is one of the most defensible brand assets you can build.
Paris Childress is the CEO of Hop AI and creator of GEOforge, a platform that helps B2B brands get cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. A former Google Country Manager and agency veteran with 20+ years in digital marketing, Paris is focused on helping brands win in the era of AI search.
