Can AI Understand Your Professional Brand?

AI-based tools parse information differently than traditional search engines. Professionals who want to be found need to adjust their online footprints accordingly, explains Christal Agostino, creator of the Reputation Architecture Method

When a potential professional contact searches for you online, does what they find reflect who you are — and how you want to be seen?

For years, you could answer “yes” by following a few reliable digital exercises designed to satisfy search-engine and social-media algorithms. You’d build out your profile on the most Google-friendly platform du jour, write a post now and then (loaded up with relevant hashtags and keywords), and maybe create a personal website or blog.

AI is upending that formula. Whereas traditional search engines match keywords to pages by crawling, indexing and ranking information on the internet — essentially functioning as highly-efficient fact-retrieval mechanisms — AI search takes a more analytical approach to parsing content, using predictive and probabilistic reasoning to infer responses that are likely to be coherent (if not reliably accurate).

Whether you like AI search or hate it, it’s hard to ignore its influence. ChatGPT surpassed a billion active monthly users in May of 2026, and roughly the same number of people regularly use Google’s AI Mode. More than a third of consumers now start their searches with an AI tool instead of a traditional search engine, and nearly half of business buyers now start vendor research that way. Recent data suggests that nearly 90 per cent of employers now use AI during at least one stage of the hiring process. 

In this environment, it’s in the best interest of any professional who wants to be found online — by a potential employer, client, investor, partner or mentor — to make their digital reputation make sense to the logical processing of AI. So asserts Christal Agostino, MBA’11, founder of BOA Media, whose resumé includes managing global partnerships for Fairmont Hotels, leading content strategy for brands like Mercedes-Benz, L’Oréal, and Bombardier, and serving as the award-winning publisher of enRoute, Air Canada’s media arm. 

“Right now, AI is quickly becoming the gatekeeper between us and that next opportunity,” Agostino explains, pointing to the growing prevalence of AI agents (such as LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant) that constantly, and sometimes stealthily, evaluate online behaviour for signals of suitability. “We all need to consider our overall plan of attack when it comes to AI: not necessarily as something that is going to steal our jobs, but as something that might keep us from getting one.”

There’s also a corporate dimension most companies aren’t addressing yet. “What’s published by and about your executives is now part of how AI understands your company,” Agostino says. “When I speak about an executive’s online presence, I’m not just talking about building a personal brand: I’m talking about architecting a piece of corporate strategy.” (A 2026 Meltwater analysis of 9.5 million AI citations backs this up: roughly 75 per cent of the LinkedIn content AI tools cite comes from individual profiles, not company pages.)

With this in mind, at BOA Media — a media production house Agostino founded in early 2025 to amplify accomplished women’s voices, and explore how they protect, grow and deploy power — she has developed the Reputation Architecture Method, which she brings to organizations through keynotes and executive workshops. As Agostino explains, a few tweaks to your online professional brand — some simple, some less so — can emphasize four things LLMs love and help you cut through the noise.

AI craves clarity

As good as AI is at making connections, it doesn’t like ambiguity, and will often move on when it encounters information it finds unclear. For that reason, Agostino advises refining your online presence to ensure who you are, what you do, and — importantly — what you want to do comes across as crisply as possible. “As AI tools pull together information about you, you need to make sure they understand where you’re positioned and how you’re differentiated,” she says. “If your digital identity isn’t clear, it will default to someone whose is.”

AI favours consistency

Imagine visiting a store for the first time, only for it to look nothing like the ads that motivated you to turn up, and for the experience to feel nothing like what you were promised. You probably don’t love the feeling of inconsistency. According to Agostino, neither does AI.

As AI search plows through a staggering volume of content, it looks for consistency. That complicates things for people who have changed careers, or names, or even locations. “The problem with having different signals about yourself online is that it causes LLMs to say, ‘Hmm, there are inconsistencies here. Is she a scientist, or is she an artist? Or are these two separate individuals?’” Agostino explains.

A simple fix, Agostino says, is to do an audit of all the biographical information about yourself that you can find and — as much as you can — add the same keywords or phrases to each. Just don’t go overboard. “Remember, there will also be humans reading this, so you don’t want to write something so loaded with keywords that it sounds robotic,” Agostino says. “But adding enough to create consistency is key.”

AI seeks out credibility

There are all kinds of content on the internet, and much of it — most, by some counts — is generated by LLMs. And believe it or not, AI is generally not interested in serving up slop. “AI wants to figure out what information is good vs. bad before it serves it up to the person or platform asking for it,” Agostino explains. “It is constantly trying to figure out: ‘Can I trust this?’”

In deciding which information to surface, AI looks for markers of credibility. And to find it, AI favours information published on platforms that are indexable (well-organized and frequently updated) and authoritative (with a low propensity for inaccuracy). Being featured in an outlet like The New York Times is a credibility jackpot, in AI’s assessment. “When it comes to authority, traditional media websites really do rank high,” Agostino reports.

But high-profile media coverage isn’t the only way to confer credibility. Agostino recommends underlining connections to your alma mater — by highlighting your degree on your LinkedIn profile, for example, or by commenting on a post by an influential fellow alumnus in your network, or by contributing to a story on a university website — because AI tends to consider educational institutions highly credible. Activities like participating in industry association events, sitting for a podcast interview, and asking trusted connections with clout to endorse your skills on LinkedIn can also signal to LLMs that you’re legit.

“If you’re stating that you have skills and credentials, but your digital profiles don’t connect you with credible institutions associated with them, it’s a red flag for AI,” Agostino explains. “So, taking the time to link your online identity with websites and platforms of high credibility is very important.”

AI loves connectedness

Say you’ve won an award for volunteering on a community board and the organization posts about it on Facebook. And over on LinkedIn, your boss has just published a glowing post about the project you just crushed. Both are markers of credibility that can strengthen the impression you make on a would-be employer or partner who just opened Claude or ChatGPT. 

The problem is, LLMs might struggle to connect the award-winning version of you on one platform with the project-crushing one on another. That’s why Agostino says it’s helpful to connect the dots. 

That can be a simple matter of posting about wins — with consistent tags and keywords — in one place, using platforms over which you have full control, like LinkedIn, Medium, Substack or your personal website. “When AI sees a central page linking out to content on other sites, it understands that its hunch is right — that these elements it thought might be related really are associated with the same person,” she explains. “It says, ‘OK, this is the same person, not just two people with the same name.’”

Agostino is the first to acknowledge that updating your online presence to catch the attention of LLMs isn’t always glamorous work, but the ROI for professionals who want to be found is undeniable, in her view: “AI won’t automatically understand everything you are and everything you want to be,” she reasons. “You have to be willing to train it. Otherwise, things can get lost in translation.”

And if you feel too busy to update your digital footprint, or if you simply find it a bit cringey to trumpet your own accomplishments, Agostino gets it. But as we move into a future in which opportunities are increasingly surfaced by automated and agentic gatekeepers, she also doesn’t want anyone left behind: “A thoughtfully fleshed-out profile is so important if you want to cut through all the AI-optimized CV slop that’s now out there.”