In the AI era, B2B reputation depends on being 'worth finding'

As AI increasingly becomes the first stop for investors, regulators and business partners researching companies, enterprise communicators need to rethink how reputation is built and measured, according to Fernando Sarael (pictured), head of newsroom at RGE.

Speaking at PR Asia Indonesia 2026, Sarael argued that B2B communications is entering a new phase in which brands are no longer competing solely for search rankings, but for how AI systems interpret, surface and describe them.

“We’re now moving from query to answers, from wanting to be ranked to wanting to be crawlable by AI, and from optimising just for humans to optimising for both humans and machines,” he said.

The shift, he added, means organisations must ensure they are represented accurately wherever AI models source information, particularly as enterprise stakeholders increasingly rely on conversational AI rather than corporate websites.

“If you want to be found, you need to be worth finding,” he emphasised. “The next key stakeholder or potential customer researching your company may never visit your website.”

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Moving beyond content production

Drawing on RGE’s experience as a global bioeconomy group operating across businesses including paper, palm oil and energy, Sarael outlined how the company’s in-house digital centre of excellence has adapted its communications strategy around AI discoverability.

Rather than accepting requests for individual content assets, such as videos or social posts, his team now starts every project by defining the intended business outcome.

“It took us a while but we eventually made the shift from briefing outputs to outcomes, from ‘let’s make three Instagram reels about sustainability’ to ‘I want this stakeholder to change its perception of RGE from A to B’,” he said.

Before any content is produced, the team asks three questions: who needs to see it, what perception should it change, and what action should it inspire.

The approach also extends beyond traditional SEO. Instead of focusing only on Google keywords, the team increasingly develops content around questions users ask AI platforms, reflecting changing search behaviour.

Platform strategy over cross-posting

Sarael also cautioned against treating every platform identically.

Based on RGE’s own performance analysis, the company found that content formats vary significantly in effectiveness depending on the platform and audience. As a result, it no longer automatically republishes the same content across multiple social channels.

“The content format also forms part of the strategy. It’s not one size fits all. Each platform has a different role and set of audiences. This is reinforced by how certain content topics and formats perform better on one platform but not on the other. We moved from crossposting to having platform specific content,” he explained.

For long-form content, the company has also reviewed whether articles meet Google’s EEAT principles - experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness - to improve their likelihood of being surfaced by AI systems.

Reputation becomes measurable

Perhaps the biggest change, according to Sarael, is treating AI visibility as a measurable business metric rather than just a communications objective.

RGE uses AI monitoring tools that simulate user prompts, analyse how AI models describe the company, categorise recurring themes and generate recommendations for improving visibility and sentiment.

Rather than chasing a perfect score, Sarael said the focus is on tracking consistent month-on-month improvement.

“We track the AI visibility and sentiment score but more important than the actual score itself is how the number increased or decreased and what content change attributed to it,” he said.

The findings are then fed back into future content planning, creating what he described as a continuous reputation management system instead of a one-off optimisation exercise.

“In summary, AI visibility optimisation is a system, not a checklist.”

AI as collaborator, not replacement

Addressing audience concerns over AI replacing communications teams, Sarael rejected the notion that automation diminishes the value of human expertise.

“They don’t see AI as a replacement for humans,” he said of RGE’s leadership.

He pointed to growing industry consensus that creative judgement remains uniquely human.

“Brands are built by humans, not robots,” he said, adding that AI should be viewed as “your assistant, your collaborator, your intern”.

“There’s craft, there’s discernment, there’s taste. At the end of the day, you still need that human element to see which is beautiful, which is good, because the machine can never do that.”

Instead, RGE encourages writers to continue producing original work while using AI to validate and refine content rather than generate it wholesale.

Transparency and community remain essential

Sarael also advocated for greater transparency when AI is used to produce communications materials, citing recent examples of AI-generated content errors that attracted public scrutiny.

At the same time, he argued that AI optimisation should not come at the expense of human advocacy.

Community engagement - including employees - continues to play a central role in enterprise reputation.

“Our internal employees can be our best advocates, and they are our first line of defence,” he said.

“How people are speaking about us is increasingly becoming more important and this includes the community.”

For organisations yet to adopt dedicated AI reputation tools, Sarael recommended beginning with a simple audit by asking multiple AI models - including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini - how they describe the company, documenting the sources cited and mapping the questions stakeholders are most likely to ask.

The exercise, he suggested, offers a practical starting point for an era in which AI increasingly shapes first impressions long before prospects ever reach a company’s website.

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