A book by Greg Cummings ยท Publication November 2026
Reputation Intelligence
Will AI recommend your business?
Your business is on trial for trust, culture, and community, and the first opinion a buyer hears about you now comes from a machine that has read whatever it could find. This is the modern blueprint for AI findability, trust, and brand reputation.
$199.00 per copy, hardcover
- 12 months of Power level access to your company's Reputation Intelligence report, included
- Ships at publication, November 2026
Hover to turn the book
The jury changed
For most of business history, a buyer decided whether to trust you from your salesperson, a neighbor and a few reviews. That is not where the deciding happens any more. People ask conversational questions and keep asking until they feel like they understand a company, and most of that happens after your salesperson has walked out the front door.
The internet was built so companies could find customers. AI is built so customers can find companies.
Chapter 9
That is the paradigm shift. The budget stops being the qualifier. The evidence becomes the qualifier, which is wonderful if you have some and brutal if you do not.
Your business is on trial
Reputation Intelligence is a book by Greg Cummings, the founder of Power100. It opens in a courtroom, and it means the image literally.
Your business is on trial. Not metaphorically in the way business books like to tell you that every day is a battle or every customer is a judge. I want you to actually picture the courtroom.
Prologue
You are at the defense table. Your employees are sitting behind you. Your family is there. The jury box is not twelve people from your hometown, it is the platforms that answer when somebody asks about your company, and the charge carries a life sentence for the business. You are not in the room. You do not get to interrupt, and you do not get to explain. Nobody reads the verdict out. The calls just stop coming.
Your founder story isn't there unless somebody can find it. Your leadership-development program isn't there unless evidence of it exists. The warranty claim where you lost money because doing the right thing mattered more isn't there unless the story exists. Read the opening argument.
The evidence gap
The evidence gap is the distance between the company you have built and the company the outside world can actually see.
Chapter 9
Greg has met companies that are far better than the internet makes them look, and he thinks that is almost every great company that is independently owned and operated. The leadership is real, the customer wins are real, the community work is real, and almost none of it can be seen from outside. Meanwhile five unhappy customers out of thousands post, comment and tell the story. The squeaky wheel doesn't only get the grease anymore. It gets indexed.
The book is careful about the other case too. Some companies have beautiful marketing and a polished story that is stronger than the organization behind it. That is not an evidence problem. That is a business problem, and the worst thing that company can do is publish more content to hide it. The evidence gap, in full.
Build the company first: the five pillars
Reality first. Evidence second. Before you worry about what AI says about your company, the book asks whether your company deserves what you want AI to say. The first half of the book is about the company itself, in five pillars, in order, because each one produces the next.
- LeadershipChapter 2Great Companies Have Great Leaders. Without Exception. It is the one belief the book says it has never seen broken.
- GrowthChapter 3A company can get taller every year and weaker at the same time. The book calls that aging.
- CultureChapter 4Challenge the employee. Develop the employee. Deliver the promise. Culture is what people experience repeatedly, not what is painted on a wall.
- CommunityChapter 5Not charity. Not a check. Not a logo on a golf tournament sign. At its highest level, community becomes part of who the company is.
- Customer ExperienceChapter 6If the roots are weak, the fruit tells you. The customer is where the whole organization becomes visible to the person who paid you.
The standard
The moment money can buy the verdict, the verdict loses its value.
Chapter 1
A ranking means nothing if everybody can have it, and an award means nothing if money can buy it. So the order is fixed: ranking first, relationship second, authority after qualification. A company earns the right to be evaluated against the standard; it does not buy it. Be worthy first. Become visible second. The standard.
Reputation Intelligence, and the repair arm
Reputation Intelligence is the credit report for your business. Not a vanity report, not a certificate, not a score designed to make everybody feel good, but an honest diagnostic of what the outside world can actually find out about your company: where you are strong, where you are weak, what is visible, what is missing, what employees say, what customers say, and what a stranger would conclude if they knew nothing except the available record.
It does not ask what you want people to think. It asks what evidence people are actually being given, measures that evidence on a schedule, and hands the gap between the record and the truth to its repair arm, the Authority Program. Because more and more of the questions people ask about a company are now answered by AI, Reputation Intelligence is the discipline of knowing what AI can find, what is shaping its answer, and what evidence would deserve to define the company.
Reputation Intelligence is the umbrella that monitors. The Authority Program is its repair arm. Anybody selling you the repair without the measurement is selling you a story.
Chapter 11
The monitoring half tells you what the answer about your company is today, what is shaping it, and what is missing behind it. The repair arm builds the evidence, and it comes after the ranking. How the method runs month to month, measure, diagnose, capture, publish, re-measure, is on See What the Jury Sees.
Why Greg Cummings, and why your business
Founder of Power100, which ranks the top CEOs and companies in the home improvement industry against a standard evaluated independently of any commercial relationship.
He started at a homeowner's kitchen table, earning trust face to face, and could not answer the question that became this book: how do we know the rest of your company is like you?
From the Power100 seat he talks to owners, CEOs, employees and partners across the industry, and watches the companies that are scaling next to the ones that are struggling. More about Greg.
The book started with a question Greg could not answer the way he wanted to. A homeowner trusted him, and then asked how they could know the rest of the company was like him, whether the owner would follow through, and whether anybody would even come back. They were not buying him. They were buying the organization behind him, and he had no independent way to prove who that organization really was. That gap became part of the reason Power100 exists.
Power100 doesn't decide the verdict. Power100 makes sure the jury has the evidence.
Author's Note
What he wants out of it is stronger leaders, stronger communities, and more privately held businesses that become something people are proud to belong to. The book is written as a challenge rather than a compliment.
If you finish this book believing the answer is more content, I failed. If you finish believing the answer is better SEO, I failed. If you finish believing the answer is getting AI to say nicer things about you, I failed.
Author's Note
Who it is for, and why
Owners and leaders of home improvement, home services and outdoor living companies, and the leaders they are developing underneath them. The examples come from home improvement, where a warranty is a promise made by the company of today about the company of tomorrow. The argument travels anywhere a stranger has to decide whether to trust an organization they cannot walk through.
It is not only for the biggest company in the market, and it is not only for the company chasing a hundred million dollars. Maybe you want to scale nationally. Maybe you want to create the best twenty-person company in your city. Size is not the point. Strength is.
If you knew your company was going to be put on trial tomorrow, what would you start doing differently today? That is the question the book leaves on the table, and the Monday morning audit at the back is where you answer it.
The way in
Will AI recommend your business?
Reputation Intelligence is the whole case, start to finish, and the Monday morning audit to run when you close it.
- $199.00 per copy
- 12 months of Power level access to your company's Reputation Intelligence report, included
- Ships at publication, November 2026
The argument, in order
- Your Business Is on TrialPrologue
The charge carries a life sentence for the business, the jury can evaluate only the evidence it can find, and you are not in the room.
- The Two Kitchen TablesChapters 1 and 7
One table has an appointment time. The other one is open at midnight, and nobody from your company is at it.
- The Five PillarsChapters 2 to 6
The first half of the book is not about evidence at all. It is about whether there is anything worth being evidence of.
- The Emphatic YESChapter 8
Weak evidence produces weak language. They appear to be a reasonable option is not a bad answer. It is the jury opening a thin file.
- The Evidence GapChapters 9 and 10
Almost every great independently owned company is better than the internet makes it look. That sentence should scare you, and the reason is not the internet.
- See What the Jury SeesChapter 11
You know your company too well. That is sometimes an advantage, and sometimes the reason you cannot see it clearly.
- The StandardChapters 12 and 13
A ranking means nothing if everybody can have it. An award means nothing if money can buy it.
- Worthy of RecommendationChapters 14, 15 and 16
Three companies walk into the same courtroom. All three want the same verdict. They do not deserve the same strategy.
Where the term comes from
Reputation Intelligence is defined in Reputation Intelligence and maintained by Power100, where it names work the company was already doing before it had a name: measuring what the outside world can find about a business, then closing the distance between that record and the truth. The vocabulary the book builds on top of it has a glossary, twelve terms with a page each. Three things it is repeatedly mistaken for have pages of their own: it is not reputation management, not SEO, and not review management.
Questions people ask
What is the book Reputation Intelligence about?
It is a book about building a company worthy of recommendation, and then making the truth of that company findable. Greg Cummings frames it as a trial: your business is in the dock, the jury box is filled with AI platforms reading whatever evidence they can find, and the verdict is never announced. It is simply acted on.
What is Reputation Intelligence?
Reputation Intelligence is the credit report for your business: an honest diagnostic of what the outside world can actually find out about your company, built from what customers say, what employees say and what a stranger would conclude from the available record.
Who wrote the book, and when does it publish?
Greg Cummings, founder of Power100, wrote Reputation Intelligence. Publication is November 2026.
Who is the book for?
CEOs and owners of companies that serve the public, and the leaders they are developing underneath them. It is not only for the biggest company in a market and not only for the company chasing a hundred-million-dollar number. As the book puts it: size is not the point, strength is.
Is the book about AI?
AI is the reason the question became urgent, not the subject. The book's own line is that AI did not create the need for trust, it exposed how much of trust has always depended on available evidence. The question it keeps asking is whether your company deserves the answer you want.
What is an Affirmation Search?
Affirmation Search is any time a search is conducted with the name of your business already in it. It is the moment someone who already knows you decides what to believe about you. The book gives it a chapter and lists the ten questions people keep asking.
From the book
Every section above is one part of the argument. The whole case, in order, is the book.
Will AI recommend your business?
- $199.00 per copy
- 12 months of Power level access to your company's Reputation Intelligence report, included
- Ships at publication, November 2026