The AI silence that cost millions.
An international FMCG giant had a problem you can’t see on a balance sheet.
AI platforms represent businesses, but in ways that don’t accurately reflect your products.
When consumers or investors turn to platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for answers about your brand or its products, a lot of the time, your business either doesn’t appear often enough or, worse, the answers were inaccurate or outright negative.
With 2.5bn prompts running through ChatGPT alone, if it was inaccurate there, where else may there be concerns? It’s a silent risk to a brand’s hard-won reputation and purchase intent. This is the new reality of the Answer Economy, where AI answers, and not search links, determine which brands get bought, backed, or buried.
The FMCG that had this audit conducted, a market leader, knew they couldn’t afford for AI to misrepresent them, especially on crucial matters like listing information that was more than 5 years old as current and reputable.
The diagnosis: 3,000 questions and a ‘Mark’ of truth
Kerry Parkin, Founder of The Remarkables, with LEO/GEO pioneer LEOPRD, deployed The Mark framework to turn this theory into immediate action.
The goal was simple: to understand the ‘mark’ the brand was leaving in AI. Instead of guesswork, the team began a rapid, rigorous audit, hitting the generative platforms with over 3,000 prompts in three weeks.
These prompts mirrored real-life language and search parameters relating to their brand:
- ‘Is this a good place to work?’
- ‘Tell me about their controversies?’
- ‘Which product should I buy if I want to look good to my friends?’
The Mark’s audit delivered the cold, hard data needed for a strategy designed to protect the business’s reputation and how it showed up across multiple platforms. The shocking insight that changed everything.
The analysis went deep, measuring visibility across the corporate brand and four major product lines, providing both an LLM Presence (Share of Voice) and an AI Visibility Score (Multi-Modal). It flagged markets that were particularly problematic, revealing where the negative narratives were most dominant.
The most eye-opening finding involved the source material that fed the AI platforms. The team could demonstrate which sources were most likely to impact their narrative pillars. Specifically, they found that the machines were not all the same, prioritising different sources in different markets, and that they need to be approached individually and with caution.
This deep dive allowed The Mark to analyse sentiment, including positive, neutral, or negative, by market, by brand, and by five core narrative pillars, from Financial Health and Growth Strategy to Reputation and Trust. This comprehensive report and its shocking insights led to a major strategic shift.
This international FMCG company is now amongst the first to adopt AI Visibility as its core content strategy.
The recommendations are now being implemented to embed AI visibility across the business scorecard and teams:
- AI Visibility Integration: Incorporate AI visibility metrics into the core business scorecard and into all communications teams’ work.
- A Full-Spectrum Strategy: Improve AI visibility covering every touchpoint, including SEO, website content, media lists and outreach, narrative, messaging, and campaigns.
- Continuous Tracking: Implement a benchmarking system that runs every 60 days to track movements and trends, and to assess effectiveness against competitors.
What is AI saying about you?
Generative AI platforms are now your newest and perhaps most powerful stakeholder. With ChatGPT alone answering 2.5 billion queries daily, your brand’s destiny is being shaped by answers. Are you invisible? Are you being misrepresented? It’s now essential to anyone who owns, protects, or manages a brand’s reputation and growth in the digital age.
Specifically, this work is designed for the Chief Communications Officer, the VP of Marketing, the Head of Digital Strategy, or the Head of Marketing, as well as any business owner looking to secure their future in the Answer Economy. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Ready to see The Mark your brand leaves in AI?
Don’t wait until a negative answer costs you millions.
Brands are often surprised when they learn where their AI presence actually comes from. A large share of it is shaped by earned authority signals that sit outside their own channels.
Approximately 62% of brand mentions in AI answers originate from sources that describe the business, such as editorial reporting, customer feedback, recognised industry rankings and awards.
Awards also influence visibility because they serve as external markers of credibility. When these signals are strong, AI has something reliable to work with, yet when they are weak or outdated, the system fills the gaps in ways that rarely favour the brand. This is why organisations that rely solely on owned content struggle to hold their place in AI-generated answers: AI looks first to voices it trusts.
Brands that maintain a steady presence in respected environments give AI far clearer material to interpret, while those that drift out of the public record often lose control of the story being told about them.
