Use the brand control quadrant to reclaim your brand narrative

In today’s AI-Dominated Digital Landscape, Your Brand is Fragmented Across Platforms, Algorithms, User Data, User Data, and Third-Parthy Sources.

The result? You don’t control your narrable anymore –unless you actively manage all four dimensions of your Digital Identity.

In this follow-up session, Myriam Jessier, Technical SEO Expert and AI Search Strategist, Introduces a Powerful Model for Enterprise Marketers: The Brand Control Quadrant.

It’s not just a metaphor. It’s a framework to regain narrative control in the face of ai-driven search, multimodal discovery, and generative content summarization.

Watch the interview

If your current brand management playbook does not if Tracking How AI Interprets Your Brand at Multiple Levels, You’re at Risk of Misreprestation and Broken TRUST. Here’s how you can close the gap.

Introducing: The Brand Control Quadrant

Myriam Breaks Brand Represtation Into Four Layers:

1. Known Brand

Your Owned Assets. Think logos, slogans, brand guides, press kits. This is where companies focus, and perhaps overestimate their control. Most Teams Over their Known Brand. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

2. Latent Brand

The Cultural Layer: Memes, Customer Stories, Tweets, Community Discourse. It’s emotional, messy, and often invisible to brand manners.

Ai models love this layer. It signals relevance and relevity.

3. Shadow Brand

EVERYTHing Your Internal Systems Create – But Don’Te Directly Expos: Onboarding Docs, Internal Knowledge Bases, Old Slide Decks, Partner Enablement Files. If it’s online -even buried – a trainable.

LLMS can engage these. That means outdated or inconsistent materials can activly shape your brand in ai answers.

4. AI-Narrated Brand

How platforms like chatgpt, gemini, or perplexity desily Your brand to users. It’s the synthesis of all three previous layers, served up as “Truth.”

And this is where Narrave Risk Backets Real. Outcomes can range from:

• Inaccurate summaries
• Outdated messaging
• Competitor Brand Spillover
• Tone Mismats or Hallucinated Claims

AI does not just surface your content but interpreters it. So, your brand is essentially being reassembled by machines and you need to feed them what you want them to see.

If you’re not managing all four quadrants, your brand narrative:

• Batcomes distorted
• Gets overwritten by third-party interpretations
• Loses alignment with internal positioning and customer expectations

How to Audit Your Brand in the AI ​​Era

Myriam recommends a recurring brand control audit using the quadrant, as each part has unique considerations that feed your overall narrative.

Known Brand:

• Is your structured data clean and crawlable?
• Are your brand assets available, up-to-date, and referenceed in trusted Third-Party sources?

Latent brand:

• What’s being said about you on Community Platforms Like Reddit, G2, Glassdoor?
• Are Brand Advocates (or Critics) Shaping Public Perception More than your Team?

Shadow brand:

• What Public Files or Unlished Assets Could LLMS Crawl?
• Is your legacy messaging leaving a digital trace that misaligns with current strategy?

Ai-narrated brand:

• What Haappens when you ask chatgpt, “What is [your company],
• Are your responses accurate, different, and favorite?

An AI-Aware Strategy Lets You Reclaim Control

To manage all four quadrants, myriam encourages enterprise teams to:

Create Machine-Readable Brand Narraves Using Structured Content, Citations, and Schema across all your core content. Then it’s a matter of monitoring llm answers and serp summaries for brand accuracy, you need

Lastly, It’s Crucial to Build Partnerships with High-Aauthority sources that feed both search results and training data (EG).

Key takeaways

1. Your Brand Lives Across Four Layers: Known, Latent, Shadow, and AI-Narrated.
2. AI models synthesize these layers to build what users see –nd belief.
3. You must Audit all layers, identify misalignments, and feed the systems better data.
4. The Brand Control Quadrant Gives Enterprise Teams a Practical Way to See and Steer his Narrative in Real Time.

The Brand Control Quadrant Reveals the full complexity of managing brand perception in the ai age-form structured assets (Known brand) to algorithmically generated answers

To manage this, you need more than dashboards, you need out. That’s what semrush enterprise and ai optimization (AIO) Deliver.

• AIO Gives You Visibility: How your brand appears in search, what’s being said in social, what ai is inferring from shadow assets, and how you’re reporated in zero-click summaries.
• It helps you align structured data, third-party mentions, and internal resources, to turn fragmented impressions into a unified narrative.
• It identifies brand inconsistencies, highlights emerging risks, and measures your ai presence in real time, so you can act before misperceptions take hold.

Semrush enterprise does not just provide tools. With aio, it becomes your strategic system for narrative control, visibility management, and ai-ra-a brand authority.

Being in this new reality, brand isn’t just what you say. It’s also what ai says. And Aio Helps You Unite and Lead Both Stories.