Today, when someone wants to know who you are, they may not Google you at all. They may ask ChatGPT. Or Perplexity. Or Microsoft Copilot. And whatever those AI platforms surface about you—accurate or not—becomes their first and sometimes only impression of you.
That is why I have spent the past months substantially rewriting and expanding Reputation Reboot: What Every Business Leader, Rising Star & VIP Needs to Know. I first published this free eBook in 2019. The 2026 AI Edition is not a light refresh. It is a reckoning with how profoundly the search and information landscape has shifted—and what you need to know about it. As the founder of Reputation Communications—and an expert defamation witness in litigation—I have been working in online reputation management since the industry began.
A Crisis Waiting to Happen
The AI Incident Database had logged over 3,000 incidents of AI mischaracterization of real individuals at the time I wrote this—and that number keeps climbing. The New York Times has called AI-generated composites that sometimes appear with wrong information “Frankenpeople.” I call them a crisis waiting to happen.
What creates this vulnerability? A vacuum. When there is little authoritative information about you published online—information you have created and control—AI systems fill that gap with whatever they can find. Old court filings. Forum posts. Scraped data from sources you never consented to. The less you have published about yourself, the more that gap will be filled by material you would never choose.
What AI Has Done to Search—and Why It Matters to Your Reputation
For decades, online reputation management meant optimizing your presence for Google. We helped clients build high-quality content, earn inbound links from authoritative sources, and push problematic results down the search rankings. Those strategies still matter. But they are no longer sufficient on their own.
AI overviews now appear at the top of nearly half of all Google search results, often summarizing information before the reader ever clicks a single link. Meanwhile, millions of people bypass Google entirely and go straight to AI platforms for answers. This is not a trend. It is a structural shift.
The Stakes Have Never Been Higher
In my work over the past several years, I have consulted on a broad range of reputation crises detailed in Reputation Reboot. Now, the reputation risk landscape includes AI-generated deepfake videos, doxxing campaigns and far more examples that our laws have not caught up to. The Blake Lively lawsuit in late 2024—in which a PR consultant boasted in text messages that “we can bury anyone”—is only the most public example of tactics that are far more common than most people realize.
Boards of directors now rank reputational risk as their largest nonfinancial concern, surpassing cybersecurity and regulatory exposure. And yet most executives still have not taken the most basic proactive steps to protect themselves online.
The single biggest mistake I see is what I have long called “benign neglect.” The work of repairing the damage takes far longer and costs far more than proactive management would have.
What the 2026 Edition Will Give You
This guide is a “what to know” resource more than a step-by-step how-to. My goal is to give you the mental model and the strategic vocabulary to understand what is actually happening with your online reputation—and to help you make informed decisions about how to respond.
Inside the 2026 AI Edition, you will find:
• A plain-language explanation of how AI platforms learn and where their data about you comes from
• The legal landscape around online defamation, Section 230, and what “Twibel” means for you
• Practical tools for protecting your privacy and removing personal data from broker databases
• A realistic assessment of how long reputation repair takes—and why
• Crisis management frameworks built for the speed of social media and AI amplification
• Guidance on building the kind of digital presence that acts as your first line of defense
• Updated recommendations on platforms, tools, and services—including what I have seen work for real clients
I have been doing this work since 2008, and I have never seen the stakes feel more immediate—or the tools for managing them feel more within reach. AI is not just a threat to your reputation. Understood correctly, it is also an opportunity to ensure that what the world finds when it looks for you is accurate, current, and genuinely representative of who you are.
I hope this guide helps you get there.
