Companies have long relied on their employer brand to win top talent, highlighting their unique mission, vision and values to set themselves apart from competitors. By showcasing their culture, benefits and professional development opportunities, talent teams can demonstrate to applicants why their company is a great place to work.
Establishing and maintaining an employer brand has never been easy, but it’s been made even more complicated by the rising popularity of generative AI. Instead of checking a company’s website and LinkedIn page, applicants are now conducting their entire job search within platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Even those who do search for a company on Google are more likely to rely on Google’s AI Overview, as the majority of Google searches don’t result in a website visit anymore.
How Can Companies Improve Employer Branding and Reputation on AI Platforms?
Companies can boost their employer brand visibility in AI platforms by:
- Tracking LLM mentions regularly
- Publishing structured, up-to-date content
- Encouraging employee reviews
- Seeking third-party press coverage
- Using LLM monitoring tools to guide strategy
During that critical discovery phase of the applicant journey, a company’s visibility is increasingly shaped by large language models (LLMs) — the underlying systems that power AI platforms — and the mountains of data they’re trained on. When candidates ask the platforms about the top employers in their field, the models tend to surface large, well-known companies with a strong digital presence and leave out those who are less visible online, regardless of whether those organizations actually align with the candidate’s skills, interests and values.
Even the companies that do get mentioned may not like the way LLMs portray them. Instead of directing job seekers to a company’s career portal or social media accounts, the platforms often pull snippets of information from online forums, employee review sites and other third-party sources. And once a negative narrative takes hold, LLMs are likely to repeat and reinforce it over time, making it even harder for employers to regain control of their reputation.
In short, LLMs now dictate both how companies get discovered and the first impression they make on job seekers. With the battle for top tech talent increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence, we spoke with top experts in the field to learn how talent teams are boosting their visibility and strengthening their employer brand in this new era.
How and Why Candidates Are Using AI Platforms
There’s an AI arms race underway between recruiters and job applicants. The applicant tracking systems (ATS) recruiters use to rank candidates now leverage artificial intelligence to help determine which candidates get noticed. To improve their ATS rankings, applicants are also using AI to align their resumes with job descriptions, allowing them to submit far more applications. Recruiters, who are now inundated with AI-generated applications, have in turn ratcheted up their AI filters and ranking systems to sort through it all, while also using AI to write job descriptions, source candidates, communicate with applicants and schedule interviews.
In effect, both applicants and recruiters have become dependent on AI for almost every step of their job search or recruitment cycle, respectively.
“From what I’m seeing, gen AI has transformed the job market,” Mark Diller, founder of AI strategy consultancy Synterra AI, told Built In. “And I think it would be a mistake to focus on candidate behavior, because to a great extent candidates’ embrace of gen AI is a direct response to recruiters’ use of AI, especially to rank candidates before a human even looks at the application.”
Job seekers’ use of AI has expanded beyond resumes and cover letters, though. They now turn to these platforms to prepare for interviews, research companies and discover potential employers. They may ask it to list the best fintech companies in New York City or the best remote workplaces for a cybersecurity professional. When they come across a job opening, they will ask the platform if the company is a good place to work, if it promotes from within or what its engineering culture is like.
These are big, complicated questions candidates are asking, and the allure of ChatGPT and other AI platforms is that they offer a narrative-style answer that synthesizes information from all sorts of sources on the internet. It’s not always useful or even accurate, but it’s a lot easier to read an AI-generated paragraph than it is to read between the lines of corporate marketing copy or wade through lengthy comment threads on LinkedIn, Glassdoor or Reddit. For better or worse, what the job seeker sees on an AI platform will determine whether they click through to the company website.
“Most start their research by asking AI about an employer, then use that baseline to guide where they click next, usually to career sites, Glassdoor or Reddit.”
“Honestly, candidates now treat tools like ChatGPT as a search engine for company reputation,” Karim Al Ansari, founder of PerceptionX, told Built In. “Most start their research by asking AI about an employer, then use that baseline to guide where they click next, usually to career sites, Glassdoor or Reddit.”
How LLMs Shape Employer Branding
About 37 percent of job seekers use AI platforms to discover and research companies, according to data gathered by Built In, and that number will only increase over time. As a result, candidates are primarily exposed to companies that rise to the top of the algorithms — organizations that aren’t necessarily the best fit for their skills, interests and values. And when applicants learn about a company, they may never visit its actual website or social media pages. Instead, the insights they receive are an amalgamation of information collected from the company’s website, news articles and user-generated content on sites like Reddit, Glassdoor or Blind.
AI search engines and chatbots prioritize information from real people, which is why Reddit threads are the top-cited source on Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and the second-most-cited source on ChatGPT, according to a June 2025 report from Profound, an AI search analytics company. For example, if a candidate asks whether a company is a good place to work, the AI’s response is more likely to be informed by an employee review on Glassdoor than a company blog post about its culture. While social media sites like Reddit are elevated, a company’s social media posts are seen as more ephemeral and are less likely to be picked up in the same way.
Sarah Schmidt, president of PR firm Interdependence, told Built In that a company’s employer brand is “no longer defined by your best piece of content, it’s defined by what shows up most consistently across multiple places. A few stray Glassdoor reviews or an inconsistent blog post may weigh just as heavy as your carefully curated careers hub.”
“A few stray Glassdoor reviews or an inconsistent blog post may weigh just as heavy as your carefully curated careers hub.”
And unlike that carefully curated careers hub, it’s more difficult to shape an AI-generated summary compiled from numerous sources across the internet. Even if one negative social media post gets deleted, another may pop up if the underlying issues aren’t resolved.
“If your culture isn’t genuinely strong, AI will surface that reality,” Alicia Mandel, interim head of HR at Voxel, told Built In. “While this might not be the ideal motivation for building great culture, it's certainly a compelling one. Companies can no longer rely on polished marketing copy alone; the authentic employee experience will emerge through AI synthesis.”
“If your culture isn’t genuinely strong, AI will surface that reality.”
Boosting your brand visibility and employer reputation has never been more important, as AI platforms increasingly shape the applicant journey. And with OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) planning to launch its own jobs platform, candidates may soon be able to find job postings, research companies and submit their application without ever leaving ChatGPT.
Tips to Surface Your Employer Brand on AI Platforms
Unlike applicants who can easily tweak their resume to improve their ATS ranking, there’s no simple prompt for talent teams to improve their visibility or reputation on AI platforms. It requires ongoing monitoring, careful content management and a deep understanding of how AI surfaces information. Generative-engine optimization (GEO), the practice of optimizing content for LLMs, is still an emerging field, but experts have already figured out several key strategies for strengthening brand presence and credibility on these platforms. Here are a few of them:
Track LLM Mentions
The first step to boosting your employer brand is to assess your brand’s visibility across multiple AI platforms — namely ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. This could be done manually by testing out various queries a candidate might have, like questions about work-life balance or potential for career growth, and then analyzing the AI-generated responses.
“Compare the answers, look at which sources are being cited and look for the opportunities for improvement as well as whitespace,” Schmidt said. “That’s your roadmap for what to fix or publish next. If you’re not doing this at least quarterly, you’re flying blind.”
But talent teams that want deeper insights might benefit from using a tool that more regularly tracks a larger sampling of queries, while also providing a more detailed analysis of the responses. Some of these tools even offer recommendations for improving a company’s visibility and reputation.
Create Optimized Content
LLMs value authentic, consistent and updated content backed by evidence — particularly in structured formats. Here are a few tips to create content that is more likely to surface in AI platforms:
Structured Formats
Structured content tends to perform better in LLMs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to transform your employer branding materials into a database. Some proven formats include FAQ widgets, Q&A pages and employee stories that highlight “something tangible” like career growth, company culture or the company’s technology stack, Schmidt said.
Consistent and Updated Information
If an LLM detects conflicting information, it will either not pull in the information or it will make note of the inconsistencies — neither of which are good for a company’s employer brand. If the employee reviews on Glassdoor or Reddit don’t line up with the aspirational language on the careers site, “you cannot count on the AI telling the story you’d like it to,” Diller said.
Talent teams can also reinforce consistent messaging by regularly updating their content. In addition to weeding out inaccurate or outdated information, routine content audits can improve visibility in LLMs. These systems value timely, up-to-date information, so it’s more likely to surface new or updated content that has been timestamped.
“I think there’s some discomfort with pulling older content — especially employee testimony — but if the perspective offered is no longer consistent with your brand messaging, it’s simply going to serve as clutter when gen AI starts synthesizing,” Diller said.
Specific Evidence
AI platforms are more likely to surface a company’s claims if it backs them up with evidence. This could include case studies, statistics or industry awards. The key, Mandel explains, is to “be specific rather than generic.” Instead of saying “we value innovation,” she suggests providing examples of employee-driven innovation or company resources that facilitate innovation.
Encourage Employee Reviews
Encourage employees to share their experiences on social media sites like LinkedIn, Reddit and Glassdoor. “When AI tools synthesize information about your company, you want them drawing from rich, genuine employee perspectives rather than just corporate marketing copy,” Mandel said.
Seek Press Coverage
LLMs give more weight to authoritative, third-party sources, like industry publications and news outlets. Companies can boost their visibility on AI platforms by being quoted in news articles, which provides third-party validation of their expertise and credibility.
“If your brand has little visibility in the media or third party news sites which is what feeds AI LLMs, then the AI results that come up are not going to be favorable,” Brennan Nevada Johnso, founder of tech PR agency Brennan Nevada Inc., told Built In. “It might tell a job seeker ‘very little information is publicly available about this company,’ and that doesn’t look good if you’re hoping to attract top talent.”
5 LLM Monitoring Tools for Elevating Your Employer Brand
Built In, the AI-powered recruitment and employer reputation platform, has launched a first-of-its-kind solution designed to help employers measure and shape their employer brand reputation so they can be visible, trusted and chosen by top talent.
As candidate behavior evolves, job seekers are turning to AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to guide their career decisions. These systems now shape perceptions about where to work, influence who gets considered and define how companies are represented to candidates.
The new Built In Platform unites employer brand insights, AI-optimized content and hiring tools in one solution. It helps companies understand how AI models describe their employer reputation, identify what drives perception and take action to strengthen their visibility and trust with both candidates and AI.
At its core is the Employer Brand Reputation (EBR) Score. The tool evaluates clients by running hundreds of prompts — the exact kinds of questions people ask when deciding whether to work at a company. It then produces an overall EBR Score and in-depth Employer Brand Reputation Report for seven core areas candidates care about, including:
- Career Growth and Development
- Work-Life Balance and Well-being
- Compensation and Benefits
- Leadership and Management
- Stability and Growth
- Company Culture
- Workplace Perception
For each dimension, the report identifies the positive and negative factors shaping perception and highlights verbatim snippets from AI-generated responses that candidates are likely to see during their job search.
The solution goes beyond diagnostics: the Built In Platform will also provide actionable next steps for improving employer reputation. Employers can:
- Correct inaccuracies or outdated information with structured content on their Built In company profile.
- Amplify strengths or address weaknesses by participating in employer roundups or publishing long-form articles.
- Engage in full-service content execution and consulting to systematically improve reputation scores over time.
This combination of scoring, monitoring, recommended actions, structured employer profiles, end-to-end content execution and consulting makes Built In the only comprehensive platform for measuring and shaping employer reputation to convert talent in an AI-first hiring market.
AI is already shaping how candidates see your company. Your Employer Brand Reputation Report reveals how your brand is performing in AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Profound can track where AI mentions your brand, how often a brand appears and which websites are influencing those answers. It can also analyze the keywords and sentiments in AI-generated responses to help companies identify consistent themes, and it can benchmark a brand’s performance against its competitors. Plus, it can track common search queries about a company or an industry, allowing teams to measure consumer sentiment and identify emerging trends.
Known for its suite of digital marketing tools and its SEO expertise, Semrush offers an AI SEO Toolkit that helps companies track their brand visibility, monitor consumer sentiment and analyze how their brand performs against competitors. Semrush also offers an enterprise product, Semrush Enterprise AIO, that provides alerts of brand mentions and recommendations for content optimizations.
Peec AI, an AI search analytics startup founded in 2025, helps brands see how visible they are in AI search engines, which sources have the highest impact and how they stack up against their competitors. The software monitors when brands are mentioned in custom prompts, and it provides recommendations on how they can improve their performance.
Meltwater has been helping companies with media monitoring, public relations, social media management and consumer intelligence since 2001. In July 2025, the company launched GenAI Lens, a tool that helps companies see what AI platforms are saying about their brand and where they are getting their information. Brands can use this tool to identify brand sentiment and learn how competitors are depicted, which can help inform their communication strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is generative engine optimization (GEO), and how does it differ from SEO?
While SEO focuses on visibility in typical search engines like Google, GEO is focused on optimizing content so it is accurately represented and ranked well by the large language models that power generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. The goal is to ensure the LLMs pull accurate, up-to-date and credible information in response to users’ queries.
Why is generative AI becoming so influential in employer branding?
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are increasingly where job seekers start their search. Instead of browsing multiple company sites or social media, candidates now rely on platforms that can synthesize information from across the internet, meaning these tools often determine a company’s first impression.
What factors influence how a company is described by an AI chatbot?
The large language models that power AI chatbots draw on public data — social media sites, news articles and forums like Glassdoor and Reddit — to generate their responses. The more consistent, credible and recent that data is, the more likely it is to be surfaced accurately. LLMs also tend to give extra weight to third-party and employee-created content over corporate marketing materials.
