PeakMetrics launches AI Perceptions to track brand reputations across five AI platforms

The service is aimed primarily at corporate communications teams that want to understand how news coverage, social media discussions and other online narratives affect what AI services say about their organizations. It reflects the growth of generative engine optimization, or GEO, as consumers increasingly ask AI assistants for product recommendations and company information. Unlike conventional search engine optimization, which focuses largely on rankings and website traffic, GEO focuses on whether and how a brand is portrayed in AI-generated answers.

Customers choose questions they want PeakMetrics to monitor, usually covering their brands, products, competitors and industry issues. The service submits those prompts to the five AI platforms regularly, records the answers and analyzes changes over time. Steven Childress, PeakMetrics' director of product, said customers typically monitor hundreds of prompts, from broad industry topics to questions about specific products or services.

PeakMetrics scores responses using customer-defined criteria such as favorability, trust, competitive positioning, message adoption and purchase intent. A company could use the system to determine whether an AI service recommends its product over a competitor's or whether responses consistently associate the brand with a desired message such as sustainability.

The platform also tracks citations a large language model discovers when searching the web before producing an answer, which can help communications teams identify the websites and individual pages influencing a response. Citation analysis is available only when the AI system invokes web search. “We give the different LLMs access to do a web search and then determine whether or not it chooses to do so,” Childress said.

PeakMetrics said it recently helped a customer trace inaccurate information about a movie theater chain to an outdated page on the customer's own website. Correcting that page enabled the organization to address the misinformation at its source.

AI Perceptions is integrated with PeakMetrics' existing narrative intelligence platform, which analyzes news, social media, podcasts and other online sources. The integration is intended to show how a narrative originates, spreads among different channels and eventually appears in AI responses.

The system also tries to distinguish authentic online discussion from automated or manipulated content. It assigns bot-detection scores to social media accounts based on posting frequency, account age and follower patterns. A partnership with Reality Defender Inc. adds analysis of potentially synthetic text, images and video.

Jessica Pratt, vice president of marketing and communications, said bot activity typically accounts for 20% to 30% of the social media content in a customer workspace and can rise during a crisis. Such activity may not reflect genuine public opinion, she said, but it can still influence people and potentially shape the sources AI systems use. “Actors can use agentic workflows to reword messages while pushing the same underlying narrative, making campaigns harder to catch through basic copy-and-paste detection,” Pratt said. “This emerging capability makes tracking narratives themselves increasingly important. Identifying who is sharing the same ideas, even when the wording changes, helps us understand how a narrative spreads and where it may have originated.”

PeakMetrics positions AI Perceptions as a reputation management tool rather than simply an AI visibility monitor. Communications teams can compare perception before and after a campaign, identify unfavorable answers and determine whether their own websites or third-party coverage are contributing to the results. “It's less about visibility of their brand and more around reputation of their brand,” Childress said.

AI Perceptions is available immediately as part of the PeakMetrics platform. The service is priced on a subscription basis, with a basic subscription costing $99 per month.