As restructuring professionals navigate the complexities of turnarounds and bankruptcy court filings, the management of public perception plays a crucial role in preserving the value of the companies they are working with and reducing chaos and confusion among key stakeholders. Historically, communications strategies focused on traditional media relations and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to manage the content listed on the first page of Google results.
Unlike the index of links provided by traditional search engines, Generative AI platforms such as Perplexity and Google’s own Gemini act as research assistants, summarizing large amounts of data into one cohesive response. For distressed companies, this means AI tools may consolidate news of a bankruptcy filing, financial underperformance, and social media sentiment into a few paragraphs and bullet points.
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence search engines has fundamentally altered how stakeholders—including creditors, employees, business partners, and potential acquirers—consume information. In this new landscape, the primary goal must shift from managing a list of links to influencing a narrative generated by AI, aka “generative engine optimization” or “GEO.”
GEO focuses on ensuring that the most authoritative sources of information are easily digestible for large language models (LLMs). Because these models prioritize clarity, structure, and frequency, it is more important than ever to maintain a consistent message across court filings, press releases, media statements, and official restructuring websites in an accessible format.
Court Filings as Primary Data Sources
Large language models increasingly rely on high-authority domains to ground their answers. For companies in bankruptcy, the court filing systems serve as a priority source of truth for AI search tools. Restructuring advisors should ensure that the “First Day” declarations and “Plan of Reorganization” summaries are drafted with not just the judge in mind, but also for the algorithms that will eventually scrape them.
To manage a client’s reputation effectively, advisors should consider the following tactical adjustments:
- Executive Summaries in Filings: Use clear, non-legalese summaries at the beginning of major filings to provide AI models with a concise “hook” that explains the path to solvency.
- Structured Data on Web Pages & Microsites: Restructuring pages or microsites should be set up using clean HTML structures and clear headings. This allows AI tools as well as reporters and other key stakeholders, to accurately extract key dates, creditor information, and the intended outcome.
- Consistency Across Channels: AI models identify patterns. If the court filings, the company website, press releases, and comments in media coverage all use a consistent narrative regarding the operational turnaround, the AI is more likely to adopt that specific phrasing in its summaries.
Mitigating the Risk of Hallucinations & Misinformation
One of the greatest risks in a distressed situation is the spread of misinformation.” Prior to the advent of AI, communications professionals would manage the spread by proactively engaging with reporters to correct inaccurate or misinformed content and share messaging and talking points to mitigate the spread. AI introduces a new risk, the “hallucination.” An AI could incorrectly suggest “facts” made up of whole cloth, such as that a company is liquidating when it is actually reorganizing or mischaracterizing the nature of the filing in a myriad of other ways. These errors often occur when the AI encounters conflicting information or outdated news reports.
Active monitoring of generative search results is now a mandatory component of reputation management. If a generative search engine provides an inaccurate summary of the restructuring progress, the communications team must flood the digital ecosystem with updated, high-authority content to “re-train” the model’s context window. Speed is essential because, as more users interact with a specific AI summary, that narrative can become reinforced within the model interface.
In the restructuring environment, where certainty is a rare commodity, managing your public narrative is essential to maintaining confidence and trust in the integrity of the turnaround process.
By Alex Goss, Director
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