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.
- AT A GLANCE
- New Companies Need Advertising — and Reputation From Day One
- After Twenty Years, Something Else Should Have Grown
- Advertising Gets Attention. Reputation Influences What Happens Next.
- We Have Watched This Develop Since 2017
- AI Search Introduces Another Possibility: Recommended
- Sponsored and Recommended Can Work Together
In the AI Search era, businesses have another objective: becoming recommendable. That requires more than paying for visibility. It requires genuine experience, evidence and a Digital Reputation ↗ that gives people reasons to trust the company and gives search engines and AI systems enough information to understand and evaluate it.
“Sponsored is a position you buy. Recommended is a position you have to earn.”
Search for almost any competitive product or service and you will probably see sponsored results. Open social media and you will find companies paying to promote products, offers and services. There is nothing wrong with that. Advertising remains an important way to reach customers.
But companies should ask another question: What happens if, year after year, the main reason 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 twenty years. It may need advertising immediately to introduce itself, generate opportunities and acquire its first customers.
But reputation building can begin the moment the doors open. A new company may not have a long history yet, but it can document 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 has demonstrated the incremental value of paid search, including additional clicks even when advertisers already rank organically. Advertising works, which is precisely why this is not an argument for companies to stop using it. ↗
But the first customers create more than revenue. They create experiences, results, relationships and potential evidence. If meaningful evidence is documented from the beginning, the company’s reputation can become better represented online as the business grows.
After Twenty Years, Something Else Should Have Grown
Imagine that the company continues operating successfully for five, ten or twenty years. Employees develop expertise. Customers return. Difficult problems are solved. The company accumulates knowledge and becomes known in its market.
Its advertising may continue because it still generates profitable business. But something else should also have grown: its reputation.
“After twenty years in business, your greatest digital asset should not still be your advertising budget.”
This does not mean an established company should advertise less simply because it is older. It means those years should have created another valuable asset alongside advertising: genuine reputation supported by evidence of what the company has done, learned and achieved.
If much of that history remains invisible online, the company may have a Reputation Gap ↗: its real-world reputation is larger than the digital environment has enough evidence to understand.
Advertising Gets Attention. Reputation Influences What Happens Next.
Research helps explain why visibility alone is not enough. Nielsen’s global research found that 83% of respondents trusted recommendations from friends and family, while 66% trusted consumer opinions posted online. ↗
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report on brands also found 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 can get attention. Reputation gives people additional reasons to decide what to do with that attention.
We Have Watched This Develop Since 2017
One of our clients began strategically strengthening its digital reputation with us in 2017. Advertising remained part of the business strategy, but it was no longer the only way the company worked on visibility and reputation.
Over the years, the client found it could operate with a smaller publicity budget than it had needed before. This is one company’s experience, not evidence that every business will achieve the same result. But it illustrates an important possibility: as reputation becomes stronger and more discoverable, paid visibility does not necessarily have to carry the entire burden of making a company known.
AI Search Introduces Another Possibility: Recommended
Traditional search taught businesses to think about positions on a page. Companies competed to rank organically or paid to appear prominently through advertising.
AI Search changes the interaction. Someone can ask which company they should consider, which businesses have experience with a particular problem or which provider might fit specific requirements.
Edelman’s 2025 research found that 91% of generative-AI users surveyed were using AI for shopping in some way, including researching brands, comparing products and summarizing reviews. ↗
That does not mean AI recommendations are objective, permanent or guaranteed. AI systems can make mistakes, use incomplete information and produce different answers to similar questions. No company can legitimately guarantee that ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or another system will recommend a particular business.
But companies can improve the information environment around them. Genuine experience can be documented. Independent evidence can become discoverable. Expertise can be demonstrated rather than merely claimed. Relationships between people, companies, achievements and areas of expertise can be made clearer.
This is where Reputation Transportation ↗ matters: meaningful evidence of reputation already earned can be captured, contextualized, connected and made discoverable through the digital world.
Sponsored and Recommended Can Work Together
The strongest position is not necessarily choosing one or the other. A company can advertise while simultaneously building a strong Digital Reputation. Paid visibility, existing customers, organic discovery and AI-mediated discovery can support different parts of the customer journey.
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 experience, evidence and a reputation that helps explain why the company deserves consideration.
“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 begin on that same first day.
In the AI Search era, companies still compete for attention. Increasingly, however, they also need to give people and machines enough credible evidence to understand why they may deserve to be recommended.
