Reputation City’s New Expert Column in Cyprus Business Focus
Your company may be losing potential clients before they ever visit your website. What if the first impression comes from an AI answer you have never checked?
In her expert column in the print edition of Cyprus Business Focus, Marianna Konina, Founder and CEO of Reputation City, explores how AI is changing how people discover, evaluate, and choose businesses – and why companies need to pay attention to the reputation these systems present.
We thank the editorial team for the opportunity to share our perspective on AI visibility, digital identity, and reputation security with the business community.
Below is the article as published in Cyprus Business Focus.
How AI Models Compete with Traditional Search
By Marianna Konina, Founder & CEO, Reputation City
The way people search for information is changing rapidly. Increasingly, the first result users see online is not a list of links but a ready-made answer generated by artificial intelligence. Decisions about partnerships, purchases, and business relationships are often formed before a potential client ever visits a website.
Research from Bain & Company shows that a significant share of searches now end without a click to a website, while AI-generated answers are becoming the primary gateway to information. At the same time, studies referenced by industry analysts suggest that AI Overviews and similar technologies are steadily reducing traffic to traditional search results.
For businesses, this shift creates a new challenge. If AI systems do not properly understand a company, that company may already be losing opportunities. This is especially relevant in highly competitive and trust-sensitive sectors such as finance, professional services, compliance, and B2B industries.
Unlike human users, AI models do not search the internet in the traditional way. They generate answers by drawing information from a broad ecosystem of sources. ChatGPT uses a combination of web and database sources, Gemini relies heavily on Google’s ecosystem, and Perplexity combines search results with media sources. Although their methods differ, they all share one priority: trusted, authoritative information.
Every piece of public information about a business matters. Corporate websites, company profiles, business registries, databases, media coverage, customer reviews, discussions on forums, Quora, Reddit, and other public sources all contribute to how AI systems understand and describe a company.
When information is fragmented, outdated, contradictory, or incomplete, AI-generated responses may become distorted. This is rarely intentional. However, the business consequences can be significant. An outdated registration record, an old negative review, or inconsistent company descriptions across platforms can influence how potential clients perceive a brand long before the first conversation or email exchange.
A company website is no longer just a marketing tool. It has become a digital passport. AI systems use websites as structured sources of identity, extracting information about a company’s activities, expertise, geographic presence, products, services, and credibility. The structure, language, facts, and clarity of a website directly affect what AI models repeat in their answers.
Many websites were originally built with traditional SEO principles in mind. Today, however, visibility increasingly depends on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). GEO is not primarily about keywords. It focuses on context, trust, consistency, and helping AI systems clearly understand who a company is, what it does, where it operates, and why it can be trusted.
If AI-generated answers are left unmanaged, several risks emerge. Businesses may be confused with similarly named organizations. Outdated information can surface repeatedly. Negative mentions may dominate responses. In some cases, AI models may even generate inaccurate conclusions when reliable data is missing.
To address this challenge, organizations should begin by analyzing how AI models currently perceive them. This includes identifying reputation risks, information gaps, inconsistencies, and areas where trusted information is lacking. Once these issues are understood, companies can build a stronger digital ecosystem supported by verified, aligned, and authoritative data sources.
This process enables AI models to consistently produce more accurate, reliable, and commercially valuable representations of a business. Reputation management is no longer limited to search engines or media coverage. In the era of generative AI, it has become a critical component of trust, compliance, partnership development, and business growth.
The smartest first step is understanding the current situation. Organizations should regularly evaluate what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI systems say about them, identify discrepancies, and actively shape the information environment that influences AI-generated responses.
As AI increasingly becomes the front door to the internet, companies that proactively manage their digital and AI profiles will gain a significant competitive advantage. Those that do not risk allowing outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate information to define their reputation.
Our Perspective: AI Visibility Is a Reputation Security Issue
At Reputation City, we believe businesses should evaluate AI visibility through a broader question:
Does the information people receive give them an accurate basis for trusting your company?
Being mentioned in an AI answer has limited value if the description misrepresents your services, confuses your identity, or repeats outdated claims. Accuracy deserves as much attention as visibility.
That is why we approach this work as part of reputation security: checking how a business is represented, investigating the sources behind inaccuracies, and strengthening the verified information available about it. The goal is to help potential clients and partners make informed decisions — before an incomplete answer becomes a missed opportunity.
For more on what happens when AI-generated misinformation threatens someone’s reputation, read When AI Hallucination Becomes Defamation: Who Protects Your Digital Identity?.
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