Stop Asking "Where Do We Rank." Start Asking "What Are They Saying."
Comms leaders are walking into 2026 with 2015 questions.
“Where do we rank?” “What’s our share of voice?” “Are we on page one?” These were the right questions when Google was the front door. They are the wrong questions now.
Your clients, recruits, reporters and board members are no longer typing keywords into a search box. They are having conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. They are not asking “top law firms for private equity.” They are asking, “I’m a GP at a mid-sized fund, we’re being sued by an LP, who should I be talking to?” The AI gives them a paragraph, not a list. A recommendation, not options. By the time anyone visits your website, the decision is often already made.
We have data on this. In recent weeks at Five Blocks, four warm inbound prospects arrived from AI chatbots: three from Claude, one from ChatGPT. Two have signed. Our usual conversion rate from Google is probably one in eight. From AI referrals, it’s looking like one in two.
It seems people treat an AI recommendation the way they treat a trusted friend’s, not the way they treat a search result.
So the old question, “Where do we rank?” is increasingly meaningless. There is no ranking. There is a narrative, assembled every minute across eight or more models, drawing from sources you have never audited. The right questions are harder. Bring these four to your next leadership meeting:
What narratives are forming about us? Not keywords. The actual story the models are telling. When ChatGPT is asked about your firm, what three or four ideas come back? Which are accurate, which are outdated, which are flat wrong? You cannot fix what you have not named.
Which sources are shaping those narratives? This is where most comms teams fly blind. The sites the models cite are rarely the ones your media relations team has relationships with. Find out who is actually writing your story before you spend another quarter pitching the wrong outlets.
Where are the gaps? What do the models not know about you that they should? Gaps are often more actionable than problems, because the territory is uncontested. If your strongest practice is invisible in AI responses, that is a content problem with a clear fix.
Where are we being criticized in ways we can address? In Google, we avoid surfacing our own negatives. In AI, run toward them. Prompt the models with “red flags” and “concerns.” The answers will sting, but many will point at fixable things: an outdated page, a competitor’s narrative gone unchallenged. We rewrote our own crisis page after an AI told a prospect we were not strong in crisis work. We never would have found that by checking our rankings.
Ranking is now an input, not an outcome. The outcome is reputation: what is being said, by whom, to whom and with what consequence. The teams that move first will set the narrative for years.
