By: Nadya Pletneva
There’s a question Katerina Baranova has started asking almost every new client before any talk of strategy or content begins: pull up ChatGPT and ask it who you are. Right there, on the spot.
Half the room reaches for their phone with a confident little smile, expecting to look good. That smile rarely survives the next thirty seconds. Someone reads out a vague answer that could describe anyone. Someone else finds out the AI has mixed them up with a total stranger who happens to share their name. And some people get nothing back at all, as though a person with their exact experience simply never existed.
“That’s usually the moment it clicks,” Baranova says. “Years of reputation, and to a machine, none of it was ever really there.”
Baranova founded SVETI PR, a personal branding and PR agency in Tel Aviv working with founders, executives, and specialists across Israel, the CIS, Europe, and the US. For years, her team’s work looked like what most people still think of as personal branding: archetypal positioning, sit-down interviews, photoshoots, YouTube and social content, media placements, brand books, coaching people through their first time on camera. None of that has gone away, and clients still ask for exactly this.
What’s changed, she argues, is that it’s no longer enough on its own.
The Part Nobody’s Really Talking About Yet
“People still buy the person,” Baranova says. “Their energy, how they think, how they talk, their story. Social media hasn’t gone anywhere, and it still needs a real strategy behind it, not just posting for the sake of posting. But there’s a layer underneath all of that most people haven’t caught up to yet: digital capital.”
She doesn’t mean simply “having a presence online.” What she’s describing is what an AI system actually knows and says about someone when a third party asks, not when the person is marketing themselves, but when somebody else is quietly trying to find a specialist, a consultant, a partner, and reaches for AI instead of a search bar.
She likes to walk clients through a small thought experiment to make the point land. Two people, equally capable, equally experienced, are both asked by someone using an AI tool: “Who’s good at X?” One comes up by name because that name, paired with that specific expertise, shows up the same way across enough independent places that the pattern is unmistakable. The other doesn’t come up at all, not because they’re any less qualified, but because as far as the AI is concerned, they don’t really exist as a recognizable, consistent presence. “That’s digital capital,” she says. “Not a nice turn of phrase. An actual, measurable gap between the person who gets mentioned and the one who quietly gets skipped.”
Why Being Well Known Doesn’t Automatically Carry Over
Here’s the part that trips up even genuinely accomplished people. Someone can be respected in their field, have decades behind them, real results to point to, and still be more or less invisible to the systems now doing a lot of the quiet filtering around who gets recommended and who doesn’t.
“It’s not that AI can’t recognize good work,” Baranova explains. “It’s that it isn’t reading for reputation the way a person would. It’s reading for a pattern: does this name keep showing up spelled the same way, tied to the same subject, across sources that have nothing to do with each other? Content that actually answers a question, not just a passing mention.”
A polished “about me” page doesn’t build that pattern. Neither does one good LinkedIn post. Even a solid press feature, if it’s the only one, tends not to move the needle much, because what AI weighs isn’t how impressive a single mention is, it’s whether the same story keeps repeating itself across places that aren’t connected to one another.
A Case She Keeps Coming Back To
Baranova brings up a project that’s stuck with her. Igor Lupinsky, a financial therapist in Israel with years of experience and a real following, came to SVETI PR seeking to expand beyond the Israeli market. Somewhere in the process, it became clear he wasn’t just sitting on good content for social media, he had a genuine research idea, something he’d been thinking through for years: why financial literacy on its own doesn’t ensure the next generation actually builds wealth.
That idea turned into an academic paper, submitted to an international finance conference. It was accepted. This September, Lupinsky is presenting it to a room full of researchers and practitioners in Krakow.
“That’s not just another piece of content,” Baranova says. “That’s someone else, an independent body, deciding his work belongs there. It’s exactly the kind of proof AI ends up leaning on when it’s trying to decide who’s worth trusting.”
Where People Should Actually Start
The first move is almost embarrassingly simple: ask a few different AI tools who you are. Not once, several times, phrased differently, and see how far off the answers are from reality.
What comes after that, Baranova says, has a lot more in common with old-fashioned PR than with anything technical. “This isn’t about tricking an algorithm. It’s the same job PR has always done, getting someone recognized consistently, in ways that hold up because other people are backing it, not just you. The only difference is that now, one of the things reading all of that is a model instead of a person.”
One More Question Worth Asking
Somewhere down the line, asking someone “how many followers do you have” might start to sound almost as dated as asking today whether they carry a business card. Not because audiences stop mattering, they don’t, but because a much quieter question starts carrying more weight: does the thing people now consult before they consult a human actually know who you are.
Most people are still putting all their energy into being seen by other people. The ones who’ve already started taking that second question seriously are quietly building a head start that will be very hard for everyone else to close later.
Katerina Baranova is the founder of SVETI PR (svetipr.com), a personal branding and PR agency specializing in AI discoverability, media strategy, and executive positioning.
