AI-Powered CEO Smear Campaigns Surge 150%: Your Crisis Playbook Is Already Obsolete
Schillings reports a 150% spike in AI-generated attacks on executives. The old 'respond quickly' playbook? It assumes you'll see the attack coming. You won't.
Here's a number that should make every executive lose sleep tonight: 150%.
That's the increase in artificially created smear campaigns targeting CEOs and senior executives between 2022 and 2025, according to crisis management law firm Schillings. Not a gradual uptick. Not a concerning trend. A full-blown explosion.
And if you're sitting in the C-suite right now thinking, "We have a crisis PR firm on retainer, we'll handle it when it comes"—I need you to understand something uncomfortable.
Your playbook was written for a war that no longer exists.
The Asymmetry Problem
Traditional reputation attacks followed a pattern. A disgruntled employee goes to a journalist. A competitor plants a story. A lawsuit becomes public. You see it coming—maybe not with perfect clarity, but you see something. Your comms team mobilizes. Legal reviews the response. You issue a statement. The news cycle moves on.
That playbook assumed a fundamental symmetry: attacks took time and resources to create, giving you time and resources to respond.
AI has obliterated that symmetry.
Today, a single bad actor—a vindictive competitor, a snubbed investor, an ex-employee with a grudge—can generate thousands of fake reviews, fabricated news articles, manipulated videos, and coordinated social media posts in minutes. Not hours. Not days. Minutes.
As Stacy DeLange from Online Reputations puts it: "An executive who has spent decades building a strong reputation can be sabotaged by hastily released content that calls their integrity into question."
Decades of careful reputation building. Minutes to attack. That's the math you're dealing with now.
Why CEOs Are the Perfect Target
You might wonder why attackers are disproportionately targeting C-suite executives rather than brands directly. The answer is grimly logical.
First, CEOs are high-value, low-volume targets. There's one of you. There's not one of your company. When you attack a CEO personally, you're attacking an individual who cannot simply be replaced or rebranded overnight. The damage sticks.
Second, the personal becomes professional. Investor confidence, board relationships, employee morale, partnership negotiations—all of these run through the CEO's personal credibility. Tank the CEO's reputation, and you've created cascading damage across every stakeholder relationship the company maintains.
Third, CEOs are public by necessity. You give interviews. You keynote conferences. You post on LinkedIn. Every public appearance creates source material that can be manipulated, taken out of context, or deepfaked. Your visibility is simultaneously your greatest asset and your greatest vulnerability.
Fourth, response complexity favors the attacker. When a brand is attacked, the comms team responds. When a CEO is attacked personally, suddenly you're navigating personal reputation, corporate reputation, legal liability, board dynamics, and family considerations simultaneously. That complexity slows response. And in the AI era, slow means dead.
The Anatomy of an AI-Powered Smear
Understanding how these attacks work is the first step toward defending against them. Modern AI smear campaigns don't look like the clumsy attacks of five years ago. They're sophisticated, coordinated, and designed to exploit how both algorithms and human psychology work.
Phase 1: Content Generation
The attacker uses large language models to generate dozens—sometimes hundreds—of unique "articles" about the target. Not copy-paste duplicates that are easy to flag, but semantically varied pieces that each tell the same false narrative in different words. Blog posts. "News" articles on sites you've never heard of. Forum comments. Product reviews that somehow mention the CEO by name.
Phase 2: Distribution Network
These pieces get distributed across a network of low-authority but indexable sites. Think obscure news aggregators, pay-to-publish platforms, and seemingly legitimate industry blogs that are actually content farms. None of these sites individually matter. Collectively, they create a pattern that search algorithms interpret as "signal."
Phase 3: Social Amplification
Coordinated social media accounts—again, generated and operated at scale with AI assistance—share, comment on, and engage with this content. The goal isn't to go viral in the traditional sense. It's to generate enough engagement signals that the content begins climbing search rankings.
Phase 4: Search Takeover
Here's where the real damage happens. Within days or weeks, when someone Googles the CEO's name, they're no longer seeing the carefully curated press coverage and LinkedIn profile. They're seeing a wall of negative content that appears, to any reasonable observer, to represent a genuine consensus.
Phase 5: Secondary Effects
Journalists doing due diligence for a profile piece see the negative search results. Potential investors do a background check and hesitate. Board members get asked uncomfortable questions at dinner parties. The damage metastasizes from digital reputation into real-world relationships.
And here's the kicker: most companies don't even realize what's happening until Phase 4 or 5. By then, you're not doing crisis management. You're doing damage control on a crisis that's already become consensus reality.
Why "Respond Quickly" Doesn't Work Anymore
The traditional crisis PR playbook has a mantra: respond quickly, respond decisively, control the narrative.
That mantra assumes you can see the attack, identify its source, and mount a coherent response. In the AI era, none of those assumptions hold.
You can't see the attack early enough. By the time the content is ranking in search results, you've already lost the window for "quick" response. The attack was being staged for weeks while you were doing your actual job.
You can't identify a single source to discredit. Traditional smear campaigns had a source—a specific journalist, a specific competitor, a specific article. AI-generated campaigns are distributed by design. There's no smoking gun to point at, no single story to rebut. You're fighting a fog, not an enemy.
You can't "control the narrative" when there are hundreds of narratives. The old playbook assumed you could get your version of events in front of people. But when search results are polluted with fifty variations of a false story, your single press release or CEO statement is drowned out by sheer volume.
The "respond quickly" playbook is fighting the last war. And in this war, speed of response is less important than never letting the attack gain traction in the first place.
The New Playbook: Proactive Reputation Defense
If reactive crisis PR is obsolete, what replaces it? The answer is a fundamental shift from crisis response to proactive reputation defense.
1. Own Your Search Landscape Before Anyone Else Does
The best defense against a search takeover attack is leaving no space for attackers to occupy. This means proactively generating and optimizing a substantial body of positive content—press coverage, interviews, bylined articles, video content, podcast appearances—so that your search presence is robust enough to resist manipulation.
Think of it like an immune system. A healthy body isn't one that's great at fighting disease—it's one where diseases can't easily establish a foothold.
2. Monitor for Early Warning Signals
By the time an AI smear campaign is ranking, you've lost. The only way to mount an effective defense is catching attacks in their early phases—when content is being generated and distributed but hasn't yet gained algorithmic traction.
This requires monitoring not just mainstream media and major social platforms, but the long tail of obscure blogs, pay-to-publish platforms, and forum posts where attacks are typically seeded.
3. Build Relationships Before You Need Them
When a crisis hits, you discover who your real allies are. Smart executives cultivate relationships with journalists, industry analysts, and influential voices before they need them.
Not because you're going to ask them to publish puff pieces. But because when false narratives start circulating, having credible third parties who know you personally and can vouch for your character is an invaluable defense.
4. Prepare Dark Site Content
A "dark site" is a website that exists but isn't public—a press room or response page you've already built, reviewed, and approved, ready to publish at a moment's notice if a crisis hits.
The equivalent for reputation defense is having pre-approved response content that can be deployed immediately when an attack is detected. Statements. Video rebuttals. Background materials for journalists. If you're drafting these after an attack begins, you're already too slow.
5. Invest in Attribution Capabilities
While you may not be able to identify and discredit a single attacker, having the forensic capability to trace coordinated inauthentic activity is increasingly valuable. When you can demonstrate that an attack is coordinated—showing common IP patterns, identical posting times, or obvious AI fingerprints—you give journalists and platforms grounds to dismiss the content as manipulation rather than genuine criticism.
The Board Conversation You Need to Have
Here's my challenge to every CEO reading this: When did you last brief your board on AI-generated reputation risk?
If the answer is "never" or "I'm not sure," you have a governance gap. A 150% increase in attacks targeting executives isn't a comms problem. It's a board-level risk that should be discussed alongside cybersecurity, regulatory exposure, and competitive threats.
The conversation should cover:
- What proactive reputation monitoring is currently in place?
- What is the company's search landscape health, and who owns it?
- What is the response protocol if the CEO is personally targeted?
- What insurance or legal resources exist for personal reputation attacks?
- How is the organization prepared to support the CEO through a manufactured crisis?
If you don't have clear answers to these questions, you're flying blind in an environment where attacks are escalating 150% in three years.
The Bottom Line
The era of reactive crisis PR is over. Not because crisis PR professionals have failed—they're fighting as hard as they ever have—but because the nature of reputation attacks has fundamentally changed.
AI has made attacks cheap, fast, and distributed. Defenders still operate on human timelines, with human resources, against human-speed expectations.
The only winning strategy is to stop playing defense entirely. Own your narrative before anyone else can. Build a reputation fortress so robust that attacks can't find purchase. Monitor for threats before they metastasize. And have the relationships, resources, and response capabilities in place before you ever need them.
The 150% increase isn't the ceiling. It's the current trajectory. The executives who recognize this shift and act now will be the ones whose reputations—and companies—survive the decade intact.
The ones who keep waiting for the crisis to respond to? They'll be case studies in how not to manage reputation in the AI era.
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If you found this valuable, forward it to a fellow executive who needs to hear it before they learn the hard way.
— Jaxon
Sources
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