Your AI Employer Reputation: 5 Strategies to Impact How ChatGPT Describes Your Company

Imagine this. Your perfect candidate for a hard-to-fill job is excited to work for you. They had a great interview experience, your team loved them, and you're eager to get the offer out.

Then you get an email: “Sorry, I’m no longer interested.”

What happened? Everything seemed right. When you ask for feedback, they tell you: "I asked ChatGPT what people were saying about your company…and what came back wasn’t reassuring."

They didn’t talk to your employees. They didn’t go to your careers page. They trusted the fastest source of truth they know: an Answer Engine.

How do you keep up with evolving job-seeker behavior while still filling critical roles? Can you actually influence what ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other Answer Engines say about you?

Yes. And this article is your practical, ethical guide.

Let’s start with a simple explanation of how Answer Engines generate information about your company.

How AI generates answers about your company

Answer Engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews learn by scanning and synthesizing publicly accessible content across the internet. They detect patterns across billions of webpages and generate answers based on what appears most consistent, reputable, and widely supported.

When an AI summarizes your company, it draws from whatever content is:

• Most available
• Most trustworthy
• Most frequently repeated
• Most consistent across multiple sources

AI relies heavily on structured, high-quality, machine-readable information coming from:

• Your website
• Third-party directories
• News articles and press releases
• Employee and customer review platforms
• Blogs, interviews, podcasts, and industry features

If multiple sources are saying the same things about you, AI interprets that as validated and credible information.

On the other hand, AI deprioritizes or ignores content that is:

• Low quality
• Inconsistent across sources
• Overly promotional
• Hidden behind logins
• Published on low-authority or obscure domains

And if there are big gaps in your online narrative, AI tries to fill them—often pulling from old reviews, stale articles, or even competitor info about you. Yikes! This is why improving and aligning your public-facing content across trusted sources is essential.

A strong, consistent digital footprint shapes what AI sees—and ultimately how it describes your company. As Answer Engines become mainstream, the time to strengthen your employer brand is now. Time to get into your five actionable strategies to engineer stronger AEO for your employer.

5 key AEO principles for AI employer reputation

1. Improve your employer ratings and reviews

Whether you have good internal company culture scores or not is simply not relevant. Move over eNPS. Employee reviews are what matter for AEO. These are the public reflections of your culture, leadership, trust, and workplace experience that shape both candidate and AI perceptions.

Employee reviews are increasingly treated by AI as a core indicator of organizational health. These reviews help AI decide whether to recommend your company as a place to work, partner with, or feature in employer-related search queries. AI uses employee-review sentiment to answer questions like:

• “Is this a good place to work?”
• “What is the culture like?”
• “Which employers treat people well?”

Mobrium has audited hundreds of employers. Companies that don’t proactively ask for reviews typically see only 0.5%–3% of employees leaving feedback, which means AI summaries often skew negative simply due to who tends to leave reviews by default.

Employee reviews also influence buyer intent. Indicators such as leadership quality, culture, compensation fairness and internal trust can surface in buyer questions and improve or damage purchase intent. This powerful crossover effect can lead to an HR team directly lifting sales as they optimize the employee review side of the equation.

How to improve employer ratings and reviews:

Diversify employee review requests across many sites. AI systems put more trust in companies with cross-platform validation. For most US companies, we recommend:

• Glassdoor
• Indeed
• Comparably
• InHerSight

Diversifying your employee reviews also mitigates risk as a few negative reviews won’t overshadow your broader reputation.

Consistently ask for employee reviews. Recent reviews matter more to most review sites and Answer Engines. Having mostly older reviews, even if they are positive, can indicate an employer’s disengagement or declining standards.

Consistently asking your employees to share honest reviews across top employer review sites shows Answer Engines patterns of activity and engagement making it more likely that you’ll be surfaced in AI-generated answers.

Oh, and sharing a top secret here, employees can post a new review once per year on Glassdoor, Indeed, Comparably and InHerSight. Keep track of who you asked when so you can ask again, or automate with Mobrium.

Reply publicly to employee reviews. Your responses to employee reviews also send a signal to AI systems. Thoughtful, timely responses to reviews, both positive and negative, demonstrate transparency and engagement, which AI interprets as a positive pattern.

Consistent caring and useful replies reinforce trust and actually mitigates potential damaging impacts of negative reviews. AI summaries often highlight company responsiveness, making this step impactful beyond just your star ratings.

Use private internal feedback loops. Making an internal feedback sharing tool available to employees can help you learn about issues before they are public. Addressing concerns in productive ways internally avoids damages to star ratings, AI summaries and their connected negative consequences.

Use reviews in marketing. Take review snippets, customer testimonials or client case studies and use them on your website. These types of EGC (employee generated content) focused marketing pieces are also good for social media.

2. Improve your customer ratings and reviews

While HR may not own this function, customer reviews significantly affect your ability to hire and sell. They influence both commercial queries and overall brand trust.

AI models read the volume, recency, and sentiment of your customer reviews to understand whether people trust you, whether your service is improving or declining, and whether your brand consistently delivers. This affects your appearance in queries like:

• “Best ___ tools”
• “Top companies for ___”
• “Recommended vendors for ___”

As is true for employee reviews, cross-platform diversification and consistency matters. You want lots of reviews and recent reviews across relevant customer review sites. Cross-site consistency tells AI that your positive reputation is real—not isolated to a single review site. When customer reviews are healthy, diverse, and recent, AI is far more likely to consider you credible and recommendable.

How to improve employer ratings and reviews:

Diversify customer review requests across many sites. You need reviews across multiple customer review sites for better credibility. This may include the following, as applicable to your industry:

• Google
• Trustpilot
• Industry-specific review sites
• Ecommerce review sites

Consistently ask for customer reviews. Google and other customer review sites also give more weight to recent reviews. And so do AI systems. Consistently ask customers for honest reviews. Yes, Mobrium can automate this for most customer review sites, but we don’t support ecommerce reviews specifically.

Reply publicly to customer reviews. Never make the reviewer the bad guy. Your consistent solution-focused replies showcase to potential buyers how they can expect to be treated and provide a signal to Answer Engines.

You don’t have to agree when a customer lies. You can set the record straight in a factual way, while still being kind. Your timely and helpful replies build in some insulation for you in AI summaries, often highlighting your responsiveness.

Use private internal feedback loops. Always have a way for customers to contact you privately via email, phone, text, chat or a suggestion box. Decide what makes the most sense for your company and be available and solution oriented to avoid some negative experiences going public and impacting your AI reputation.

Use reviews in marketing. Take review snippets, customer testimonials or client case studies and use them on your website. These types of UGC focused marketing pieces are also good for social media.

3. Optimize website authority & AI readability

As is true for SEO, your website remains the primary “source of truth” for AEO as well. Although Answer Engines don’t read your site like humans. They scan it for:

• Clear structure
• Consistent terminology
• Machine-readable formatting
• Up-to-date information

A well-organized website makes it easier for AI to confidently generate accurate summaries of your business, your services, and your employer brand. Pages like About, Services, Careers, Locations, and Leadership profiles carry significant weight because they help AI understand your identity.

Schema markup (code added to a website's HTML that helps search engines understand content better) and SEO hygiene make your website more “machine-readable.” They act like labels that tell AI what each page represents, simplifying interpretation and increasing your likelihood of being surfaced in AI-generated answers.

For HR teams it is important to structure job postings, culture descriptions with detail and accuracy. This updated career content is crucial. AI uses it to position you as a potential employer for job seekers.

How to improve machine-readability of your employer brand:

Ensure good SEO hygiene and schema markup. Ask your IT or marketing team to ensure good SEO hygiene and schema markup throughout the website. This makes it easier for AI systems to scan and interpret your website content.

Maintain foundational website pages. Ensure your website has key sections for AI to reference for foundational info about your company, including: About, Services/Products, Careers, Locations, Leadership, and pages updated. Keep these updated for accuracy.

Optimize your Careers page. Think of what job seekers (and AI) would want to know about working for you. Be detailed in showcasing what it means to work at your company, including key elements like:

• mission and values
• what employees love most (based on employee feedback)
• benefits and compensation philosophy
• job openings
• what makes your environment unique

4. Build a Credible Footprint Across the Web

Your website matters a lot, but AI relies heavily on what the rest of the internet says about you — not just what you say about yourself. This is called entity validation. It’s one of the fastest-growing signals in Answer Engine Optimization.

When you appear on podcasts, in press coverage, in thought leadership articles, or in industry directories, AI interprets this as proof that:

• you are legitimate
• people talk about you
• others trust you
• you contribute to your industry

For HR leaders you should be focused on employer awards, culture spotlights, and leadership interviews.

How to strengthen your employer’s digital footprint:

Qualify for best-place-to-work awards. Review sites like Glassdoor, Comparably and InHerSight combined have over 30 awards that can be earned as a result of quality and quantity of employee reviews received. No application or fees needed. Just consistently ask for honest employee reviews.

Get your CHRO and other HR leaders in the media. Relevant podcasts, webinars and article collaborations mentioning your employer and linking to your website have high AEO value.

Publish company culture related press releases. As you grow and achieve milestones, share these victories in a press release on your website and actively request local and industry publications share the news.

Maintain strong LinkedIn and directory profiles. Your employer’s LinkedIn profile as well as directory profiles are highly trafficked and used to cross-reference info with your website by both people and AI. High value directory profiles include:

• Crunchbase
• Bloomberg
• BBB
• Google Business Profile
• Industry-specific directories

5. Strengthen Your Technical Trust Signals

People may not inspect your website’s technical security, but Answer Engines absolutely do. If your site looks unstable, outdated, or risky, AI may deprioritize you — even if your culture is great.

Additionally, if your site is slow, unsecure, full of errors, or missing trust indicators, AI may deprioritize you or skip you entirely.

This is another section that HR leaders likely don’t handle directly, but your recruiting and retention efforts are actually affected by this. Share with your marketing or IT team for help.

How to strengthen your technical trust signals:

Deploy modern security basics. Ensure your website has the following:

• HTTPS/SSL
• Secure hosting
• Automated security patches
• Malware scanning
• Firewall/bot protection (like Cloudflare)
• Updated CMS/plugins

Showcase cybertrust. Your website should include the below elements. Complex legal language not required. Clarity is often better:

• Privacy policy
• Terms of service
• CCPA compliance (if applicable)
• Email opt-in clarity (if applicable)

Maintain good website hygiene. Unlike SEO hygiene that is focused on inclusion of search terms, website hygiene includes things that foster a positive user experience on your site. Check for the following:

• No broken links
• Fast load times
• Mobile-friendly design
• No duplicate content
• Clean navigation structure

Want help improving your employer’s AEO and star ratings?

With Mobrium, you can be your team’s hero. Automate employee reviews, improve employer ratings, generate strategic review replies, and strengthen your AI employer reputation, all while improving hiring and employee happiness.

Worth exploring?