21 September 2026 | Issue #135
In this issue:
- What Happens When You Rebrand and AI Doesn't Care?
- New Research on AI Citations and Content Marketing
- Trademarked!
- Design quote of the week
Your Rebrand Launched. ChatGPT Doesn’t Care.
Every rebrand ends the same way. Website updated. Socials updated. Sales deck updated. High-fives and celebratory drinks all around. Job done, right?
Not even close. If you’ve done this in the past, you know it’s more than that. But if it's been a while since your last one, some of what you know is out of date.
Papirfly's research on rebranding in the AI era explains the details, and a conversation Emberos founder Justin Inman gave to BRXND Dispatch fills in the part Papirfly doesn’t: what actually doing something about it looks like.
There’s a lag time
LLMs are trained on snapshots of the web. They don't update when you do. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about your company six months after a rebrand, and there's a real chance it answers with your old name, your retired positioning, language you killed two years ago. Papirfly cites research that puts the typical lag at 6 to 18 months for AI platforms to catch up, and up to 24 months if you had a lot of historical coverage. The more successful your old brand was, the longer it haunts you (sorry).
Consistency was always the job
Papirfly cites a stat that should embarrass most of our industry. 95% of organizations have brand guidelines, but only 25-30% of teams actually use them. That gap was already costing brands money before AI entered the picture. Now it’s unforgiving.
Justin Inman would know. He spent years leading enterprise growth at Google, now sits on the IAB’s AI Board, and recently raised a $5.5M seed round for Emberos, which he calls “an operating system for AI brand management.” Here's how he explained the shift to BRXND Dispatch: “Brand managers historically marketed to different channels intentionally, because they knew different audiences lived on those channels... The problem is that breaks in this world, because the LLMs favor coherence. The second you start to have different messaging, it gets confused, and that's where we get into the hallucinations.”
In other words, the slightly-different-voice-on-LinkedIn-versus-your-website move that always felt like a misdemeanor now reads to AI as contradictory source material. It picks a version. Unfortunately, you don’t get to choose.
This just became a venture-backed category
Inman's own line nails why this matters more than a hygiene fix: “Knowing what ChatGPT says about your brand is useful. Knowing why it says it is more valuable. Knowing what is likely to change next, what you can do about it and whether that action worked is where this becomes an enterprise operating function.”
Most brand teams are still on step one, occasionally asking what ChatGPT thinks of them.
And the stakes aren’t abstract. Inman’s team has reported that Hollywood studios find their own movies filed under the wrong genre in AI answers roughly 20% of the time. A dark comedy labeled a violent thriller alienates exactly the audience that would've loved it, and the mistake sticks. This is already happening to brands with entire departments dedicated to controlling their story.
Where this leaves brand managers
Papirfly’s advice is still the right starting point. Audit what AI already says about you. Consolidate your assets into one governed system. Actively replace the old signal instead of just retiring it.
Inman's read is more uncomfortable. This isn't a task you knock out during rollout. It's a new, ongoing function nobody currently owns. “Legal owns claims, comms owns narrative, SEO owns content, and AI blends all three into one sentence that’s in nobody's job description,” he said. My bet: it lands on marketing by default anyway, one more line item on a plate that was already full.
Rebrand work used to end when the campaign launched. Then you spent the next stretch educating the public about whom you’d become. Now that whole sequence is the “easy” part. The real work starts after launch: erasing the old brand while building the new one, at the same time, in front of machines that are still repeating what you used to be.
Who knew the old SEO days were the easy days? Convincing people you’ve changed is hard. Convincing the machines you’ve changed is even harder.
If you rebranded this year, go ask ChatGPT what it thinks your company is called or what you’re known for. Then ask yourself why it'd say that.
NEWS YOU SHOULD KNOW
If you're in marketing, you're going to want to see the new research published by Orbit Media. Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit was recently on AI Marketing Companion with Sandy Carter to run through some of the key stats that you NEED to understand.
EBRIUS
If you've worked with me in the past, you know my consultancy's name is Ebrius LLC.
The name dates back to when a friend and I were brainstorming an online wine-ordering business. I did some research and discovered the word "ebrius," the Latin root of the word inebriate, and I registered ebrius.com. Nothing came of the business, but I had a 6-letter .com and held on to it. A few years later, I adopted it and registered it as my business name.
This week, I trademarked it!
There were a bunch of steps along the way, and I probably didn't need to do it. But it's always good to know what that process looks like.
