AI is pulling your brand away from shore

Someone just asked ChatGPT about your company. The response was a confident, authoritative summary of your brand that’s about 60% accurate, 30% outdated, and 10% completely invented.

Welcome to AI brand drift, where your carefully crafted messaging gets hijacked, reconstructed, and redistributed as an alternative truth you never approved.

Every customer complaint, viral social media post, internal presentation accidentally left public, and leaked memo becomes LLM fuel. And unlike traditional search, where you could at least see what ranked for your brand terms, AI systems are synthesising all of this into responses that millions of people encounter daily.

You’re not just competing for share of voice anymore. You’re fighting for narrative control in AI’s memory banks.

Invisible forces and shifting perceptions 

Recent data from Evertune tracking brand visibility within model outputs shows just how rapidly AI brand perception is evolving. In the project management software space alone, comparing September to October 2025 revealed dramatic shifts: Atlassian surged whilst Trello, Slack, and Monday.com posted notable drops.

These weren’t caused by any actual changes in the market. It was the AI’s unaided brand awareness that drifted – even when nothing visible changed in the market itself.

Recent research by Seshes.AI found that when comparing how brands appear across traditional search results and LLM responses, only 43% of the most-cited brands overlapped. Half the brands dominating AI conversations are invisible in traditional search metrics.

Mind what lurks in the shadows

Now we get to the crux of the matter: the shadow brand. A term to describe the sum of internal, proprietary, or outdated digital assets your organisation created but never meant to expose.

That onboarding document from 2019? The internal wiki with outdated positioning? If these are accessible online, even buried, they’re trainable by LLMs.

The simple exercise of managing official brand assets has evolved into a defence case against every piece of content that’s ever accidentally escaped into the wild.

The risks of drifting away

The costs aren’t hypothetical either. There are already some pretty high-profile cases emerging: 

• Google’s parent company lost roughly $100 billion in market capitalisation when Bard confidently claimed the James Webb Space Telescope took the first picture of an exoplanet. It didn’t.
• Air Canada’s AI tool gave incorrect bereavement fare advice, leading to legal action and refunds. The airline’s defence that the chatbot was a “separate legal entity” didn’t fly.
• In October 2025, Deloitte’s A$440,000 report to the Australian government contained non-existent academic sources and fake quotes. They issued a partial refund.

The takeaway? Customers don’t distinguish between AI getting it wrong and a brand publishing false information. It’s your credibility on the line no matter what.

Taking back the narrative reins 

The bad news is you can’t control what LLMs say about you. But the good news is you can start tracking it.

The early adopters of AI monitoring are already reaping returns. According to AI search visibility platform GetMint, some of its clients see over 30% of their business coming from LLM recommendations. 

And when you consider the fact that Google’s AI Overviews appear in nearly half of all monthly searches, your brand needs to be part of these conversations – or you’re invisible.

Smart brands are looking to control the narrative by implementing three-layer monitoring:

Active surveillance: Track how often your brand appears in responses from relevant AI systems, review its frequency in recommended brand lists, and analyse trends using historical tracking tools. 

Content hardening: The most influential signals inside an LLM are repeated text patterns –  messaging pillars, taglines, boilerplate descriptions. Your About page isn’t an afterthought anymore. It’s your first line of defence against brand drift.

Shadow asset audit: Most teams don’t track their shadow brand, leaving a major gap in their narrative defence. Find every old deck, archived blog post, and internal document that’s somehow accessible online.

The new brand reality

By 2026, AI brand signal stability will sit next to share of voice and keyword rankings as a core visibility metric. Your brand voice is being remixed in real-time across dozens of AI platforms. Every outdated claim, every leaked document, every angry customer review is fair game.

The choice is simple: start tracking how AI represents your brand, or keep wondering why prospects have completely different ideas about who you are than the story you’re trying to tell.

Because right now, AI is telling your brand story. And it’s not asking for your approval.

Need help getting your brand story straight before AI mangles it?

We help B2B companies create narratives that cut through the noise for both humans and LLMs.

Get in touch before the internet writes your story for you.