Your Brand Reputation Precedes You With AI, Whether You Like It or Not

Marketers, take note: New research using 2.7 million data points from the 2026 Winter Olympics revealed how AI systems form and preserve narratives about brands, athletes, and organizations.

This has big implications for your brand and many others.

What did researchers from Seer Interactive discover?

When a user asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity about a company, they don’t simply retrieve current facts. They complete a story that’s formed over time.

So if the dominant narrative about your brand was set months or years ago, by a Glassdoor review, a news story, or an analyst report, for example, AI will likely keep telling that story even if it’s changed.

Researchers at Seer Interactive call this Narrative Gravity.

The concept emerged from an ambitious study of AI search behavior. John Lovett, VP of Analytics at Seer Interactive, and his team used the 2026 Winter Olympics as a real-time testing ground, tracking six major AI platforms, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Meta AI, over a nine-week period.

The team asked the same questions across all platforms every day, ultimately generating 2.7 million data points on how AI systems surface, cite, and suppress information.

The findings are being presented at the AI for B2B Marketers Summit, and they have significant implications for your brand.

The Experiment: When the Favorite Loses, AI Still Says They Won

The Olympics offered a rare controlled environment for Lovett and his team to conduct this AI search experiment: predictable narrative arcs, high-frequency breaking news, global media coverage, and clear, verifiable outcomes.

One pattern kept appearing: Before an event, a consensus story had formed around a favored athlete or team. When the actual result diverged from that expected arc, researchers asked narrative-framed questions — the kind a casual user might type into an AI chatbot. The AI systems kept completing the expected story. Confidently.

“The framing of the question decides whether you get current truth or a pre-completed narrative based on parametric (training) knowledge,” Lovett explained. “If your brand sits inside a dominant industry storyline, AI may keep telling that story regardless of your most recent move.

“That is both a risk and an opportunity. You can influence it.”

For brands in fast-changing industries or brands trying to reposition, this is key to understand and address.

The Past is Hard to Shake in AI

To illustrate how Narrative Gravity plays out in a business context, Lovett points to Seer Interactive’s own experience.

The company discovered that multiple LLMs were surfacing a years-old negative Glassdoor post when users asked about Seer, framing it as evidence of an employee retention issue. The models weren’t wrong to report that the review existed. But they were presenting a single data point as a defining truth about the organization.

“If a brand has a reputation for something, it’s hard to shake,” Lovett said. “Narrative Gravity in LLMs is like having your reputation precede you.”

Seer wrote a blog post addressing the issue directly in a deliberate attempt to inject a counter-narrative into the information ecosystem. The broader lesson, though, is structural: AI systems try to present “balanced” information, and in doing so, they can give disproportionate weight to isolated, negative signals simply because those signals exist and have been published.

For marketers, this reframes reputation management in a significant way. The question is no longer just what your brand says about itself. It’s what the training data says about your brand and whether you’ve built enough authoritative, counter-narrative content to reshape any of the negative that AI “knows.”

The Aicher Principle: You Can’t Buy Your Way In After the Moment

The research surfaced a second major finding that Lovett calls the Aicher Principle: events amplify what already exists. They do not create presence from nothing.

During the Olympics, certain athletes made genuine news with their results, records, and star moments that rippled through global media. But if those athletes lacked a pre-existing digital footprint — owned content, third-party validation, community discussion — the AI systems largely failed to surface them in response to relevant queries. The news couldn’t build the foundation. It could only amplify one that was already there.

The data showed three visibility signals that compound when present together:

• entity authority (you own your entity’s definition)
• third-party validation (others affirm it)
• community discussion (audiences reinforce it)

These signals are sequential or interchangeable.

“Entity authority gates everything,” Lovett said. “You own your entity first, third parties validate you second, community discussion reinforces you third. Skip the first step and the others do not compound.“

The gap between owning one signal versus all three is significant: 7.8x average AI mentions.

It’s cumulative advantage: AI-mediated discovery surfaces entities with established authority. That visibility generates new third-party coverage. That coverage feeds back as still more authority. The system rewards prior presence, then compounds it.

“The authority you build today is cheaper than the authority you will need tomorrow to reach the same position, because every cycle of AI-mediated search raises the entry price for everyone who waited,” Lovett said.

What This Means for B2B Marketers Now

The 2026 State of AI for Business Report published by SmarterX, finds that only 3% of respondents cite AI-powered search as the trend they’re following most closely, suggesting more attention needs to be paid to how AI systems are reshaping discoverability.

Meanwhile, 40% of professionals say agents and agentic AI are their top emerging trend, indicating that teams are focused on AI production capabilities while their AI visibility may quietly erode.

For B2B brands, the risk is particularly acute. Purchase decisions are increasingly informed by AI-generated summaries. A buyer asking an AI about vendors in your category will receive a curated answer, and if your brand lacks entity authority, that answer won’t include you, no matter how much you spent on paid search last quarter.

Lovett’s session at the AI for B2B Marketers Summit will provide attendees with a validated framework for AI visibility, concrete tactics for citation optimization, and a clear model for how real-time events reshape what AI systems “know.”

To find out more about AI for B2B Marketers Summit or to register, visit: https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/events/ai-for-b2b-marketers-summit