Get ready to discover the top 5 best social media crisis management strategies that can save your brand's reputation and keep your audience loyal.


In today's digital landscape, online reviews have undergone a remarkable transformation. Once primarily serving as trust signals to help potential customers make decisions, reviews now play a crucial role in how artificial intelligence understands and represents your business in search results. This evolution has profound implications for businesses looking to maintain visibility in an AI-driven search environment.
Traditionally, online reviews functioned as social proof—convincing potential customers that your business was trustworthy and worth their time. While this remains important, reviews have taken on an additional dimension: they've become training data for AI systems.
As noted by Claudia Tomina, a Google Business Profile expert specializing in reputation management, "Reviews are no longer just persuasive. They're data. They're content. And more importantly, they're shaping how AI systems understand your business."
This shift means businesses need to view reviews not just as ranking boosters or conversion tools, but as fundamental components of their content strategy. The language customers use in reviews directly influences how AI interprets and presents your business in search results.
Modern AI search doesn't simply match keywords to web pages. Instead, it breaks down user queries into multiple "synthetic queries" to better understand user intent.
When someone searches for something like "Best cafes to work from,” AI doesn't just look for those exact words. It expands the query into multiple angles, including implicit assumptions perhaps “Quiet coffee shops with free Wi-Fi” (implicit: work requires internet and minimal noise), “Cafes with power outlets and comfy seating” (inferred: user plans to stay for extended periods), “Work-friendly cafes near me with strong coffee” (pattern: combines frequent phrases in work café searches).
This complex reasoning process means that ranking well requires more than traditional SEO tactics. It requires having content that helps AI connect various related concepts—and reviews excel at providing this kind of natural language data.
Reviews contain the authentic language of customers—precisely the kind of natural, varied phrasing that people use when searching. While your website might describe your restaurant as "Authentic Italian Cuisine in Downtown," a customer review might mention it's "perfect for a quiet date night with dim lighting and affordable pasta dishes."
This difference matters because, as Tomina explains, we're now "structuring content in a way that helps AI connect ideas and draw conclusions across multiple related searches—even ones that users haven't directly typed out." Reviews provide those connections naturally.
While structured data like schema markup helps search engines understand specific attributes of your business, it has limitations:
Google has recognized the value of reviews as AI training data and has evolved its review forms accordingly. Instead of just collecting ratings and comments, Google now prompts users for structured details about noise levels, average spending, seating options, dietary accommodations, and parking conditions.
This shift allows Google's AI to better understand specific attributes of businesses and match them to increasingly nuanced search queries, especially in AI Overviews and conversational searches.
To leverage the power of reviews in this new landscape:
While there isn't definitive evidence that AI models are actively training on review responses yet, it's reasonable to assume these responses provide valuable natural language and contextual information that could help AI better understand businesses.
For example, if a customer mentions loving your outdoor patio and you respond that it's "open year-round with heaters in winter," this additional context could eventually help your business appear in searches for "heated patios near me."
"We used to write for Google. Now we need to think about how our customers write about us," Tomina concludes. Reviews have evolved from simple social proof to become AI training data—perhaps the most valuable content your business has in an era where search is increasingly conversational.
In this new landscape, businesses that recognize the dual role of reviews—both as trust signals for consumers and as AI signals for search engines—will be better positioned to maintain visibility and relevance as search technology continues to evolve.
This article is based on insights from Claudia Tomina's June 2025 LinkedIn article "From Trust Signals to AI Signals: The Evolution of Online Reviews."

Get ready to discover the top 5 best social media crisis management strategies that can save your brand's reputation and keep your audience loyal.
Interested in safeguarding your brand's reputation? Discover the top 5 best tools for online reputation management that every small business should use.
AI-powered review management for restaurants in 2025 is revolutionizing the space, but what unforeseen challenges could emerge as these systems take center stage?
Gear up to revolutionize your small businesses social media presence with our seven proven strategies! A game-changer waiting to be explored!
Overcome Your PR Crisis with these top 6 crisis management strategies; uncover the secrets to turning chaos into an opportunity.
online reviews have the power to make or break your business reputation. With customers researching brands before they buy, review management is no longer optional—it’s essential. The right approach to collecting, monitoring, and responding to reviews not only builds trust but also drives real business growth. Whether you run a small local shop, a large […]