AT A GLANCE
Advertising remains important, especially for new companies that need customers before they have had time to become widely known. But advertising should not become the only reason a company appears when people search for what it sells.
In the AI Search era, businesses have another objective: becoming recommendable. That requires more than paying for visibility; it requires building the experience, evidence, trust and digital reputation that give people reasons to trust the company and search engines and AI systems enough evidence to understand and surface it.
“Sponsored is a position you buy. Recommended is a position you have to earn.”
Search for almost any competitive product or service today and you will probably see sponsored results. Open social media and you will find companies paying to promote products, offers, events and services. This is normal business, and advertising remains an important way to reach customers.
But companies should ask a second question: what happens if, year after year, the main way people discover us is because we continue paying to appear? Advertising may be working perfectly while the business remains too dependent on purchased visibility.
New Companies Need Advertising — and Reputation From Day One
A company that opened last month cannot expect to have the reputation of a business that has served customers for 20 years. It may need advertising immediately to introduce itself, generate its first opportunities and acquire its first customers.
But reputation building should begin the moment the doors open. A new company may not have a long history yet, but from its first day it can begin documenting who is behind the business, what experience they bring, how customers are treated, what problems are solved and what results are achieved.
“A company cannot open its doors with twenty years of reputation. But it can start building reputation the day the doors open.”
Google research supports the value of paid search. A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies found substantial incremental traffic from search advertising, including additional clicks even when advertisers already ranked highly in organic results. Advertising works, which is precisely why this is not an argument for companies to stop using it. ↗
The first customers then become more than sales. They create the company’s first experiences, results, testimonials, relationships and evidence. If those signals are documented from the beginning, the company’s digital reputation can grow alongside the business instead of becoming something management suddenly realizes it needs ten years later.
What Should Change as the Company Grows?
Imagine that the company continues operating successfully for five, ten or twenty years. Its experience grows, employees develop expertise, customers return, difficult problems are solved and the business becomes known in its market. Its advertising may continue because it still generates profitable business.
But something else should also be growing: its reputation. A mature business should have more reasons to be discovered and trusted than it had when it first opened, because it now has years of real experience behind its name.
“After twenty years in business, your greatest digital asset should not still be your advertising budget.”
This does not mean a 20-year-old company should spend less on advertising simply because it is older. It means those 20 years should have created another valuable business asset alongside advertising: a reputation capable of influencing how customers, partners, search engines and increasingly AI systems understand the company.
Trust Matters After You Get the Attention
Research helps explain why visibility alone is not enough. Nielsen’s global research found that 83% of respondents trusted recommendations from friends and family and 66% trusted consumer opinions posted online. The research demonstrates something business owners already experience every day: people do not rely on advertising alone when deciding what to buy and whom to trust. ↗
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on brands goes further. Based on 15,000 respondents across 15 countries, the research found that trust had become as important as quality and value for money as a purchase consideration. ↗
This is why advertising and reputation should not be treated as competitors. Advertising gets attention, while reputation can influence what happens after that attention has been won.
We Have Watched This Develop Since 2017
One of our clients began strategically building its digital reputation with us in 2017. Advertising remained part of the business strategy, but it was no longer the only way to strengthen the company’s visibility and reputation.
Over the years, the client saw that it could work with a smaller publicity budget than it had needed before. This case is one company’s experience, not proof that every business will achieve the same result, but it illustrates an important possibility: as reputation becomes stronger, paid visibility does not necessarily have to carry the entire burden of making a company known.
AI Search Introduces a New Position: Recommended
Traditional search taught businesses to think about positions on a page. Companies competed to rank organically or paid to appear prominently through advertising, with the click usually serving as the bridge between search and the company’s website.
AI Search adds another possibility. People can now ask which company they should consider, which businesses have experience in a particular area, which product fits their needs or which provider an AI system would recommend.
Edelman’s 2025 research found that 91% of generative-AI users surveyed were already using AI for shopping in some way, including researching brands, comparing products and summarizing reviews. Edelman also points to reputation, relevance, credibility and clarity as factors influencing what AI systems surface about brands. ↗
A company cannot simply purchase that recommendation in the same way it purchases an advertising position. Advertising may place the company beside an AI answer or elsewhere in the customer journey, but recommendation depends on what can be discovered and evaluated about the business.
Sponsored and Recommended Can Work Together
The strongest position is not necessarily choosing one or the other. A company can advertise aggressively while simultaneously building a strong digital reputation, allowing paid visibility, existing customers, organic discovery and AI-mediated discovery to support one another.
The danger is reaching year ten or year twenty with advertising still doing almost all the work of introducing the company to the market. Years of business should produce more than revenue; they should also produce a growing reputation that helps explain why the company deserves to be chosen.
“The goal is not to stop being Sponsored. It is to make sure Sponsored is not the only reason people see your name.”
Advertising can help a company become visible from the day it opens its doors, and there is nothing wrong with continuing to advertise for decades. But reputation building should start on that same first day, because in the AI Search era the competition is no longer only about who can appear—it is increasingly about who deserves to be recommended.
