Your place’s reputation is one of its most valuable assets. But measuring what impact your place brand is having remains one of the perennial challenges in place branding. What does success look like? And are you measuring what actually matters – or just what’s easy to measure?

Ahead of City Nation Place Global, we reached out to our speakers to understand how you can determine if your place brand is resonating internally and externally and how the rise in AI is impacting the way that teams track success.

Moving beyond traditional marketing metrics

“Ultimately, a strong place brand should influence what people associate with a city, how relevant they consider it, and whether they would recommend, visit, work, study, invest, or establish a business there,” Marco Esser, Director at The Hague & Partners, told us.

Getting this right requires a combination of both quantitative data with qualitative insights – but the days where heads in beds or total FDI inflow ruled the roost are behind many place brand and marketing teams. Instead, the focus is moving to whether you have moved the needle on perceptions of your place or delivered against your place’s broader ambitions.

For example, Fabienne Berrnet, Digital Marketing Manager – Investment Promotion at Switzerland Global Enterprise, explained that their focus is on moving “beyond traditional KPIs like job creation and marketing metrics to better assess the wider impact of foreign direct investment,” including how FDI contributes to the Swiss innovation economy. For Lilás Cajueiro do Nascimento, BD Manager - Europe for Brazil’s tourism board, Embratur, the key marker of success is when the strategy shifts from top-down imposition and “becomes a tool for socioeconomic empowerment” and their residents recognise the broader benefits of the brand within their own lives.

David Gilbert, President & CEO of Destination Cleveland, highlighted that it was important to measure external perceptions of your place brand amongst key audiences and how those perceptions change over time. “To be meaningful,” David continued, “these measures should connect perception change to outcomes that matter most to the community and its stakeholders, such as visitation, talent attraction, business investment, event selection, and return visitation.”

Marius Gurskas, Director of Communication for the Lithuanian Government Office, shared a similar perspective, stressing that “place leaders should measure resonance, not just visibility. The question is not only ‘did people see us, but ‘did the right people understand us, trust us, repeat us, and act differently because of us?’”

Tracking internal adoption of your place brand narrative

If tracking the external impact of your place brand strategy links perception to changes in behaviour (visitation, relocation, investment, etc.), what does that look like when you are measuring the internal impact of your strategy?

“Internally, we look at whether residents and institutional stakeholders recognise themselves in the narrative and are willing to carry it forward as ambassadors, not just repeat a slogan,” advised Constanza Rojas Bravo, Strategic Alliances Manager at Marca Chile.

This was not an isolated opinion, with many place leaders citing that seeing your place brand narrative repeated back to you by residents, ambassadors, private sector leaders, and local celebrities is the strongest indicator of that your place brand strategy is having an impact internally.

Lithuania’s Marius Gurskas added an additional stress test to this, suggesting that place brand leaders should track “narrative coherence during crises [and if] internal actors know how to explain the country under pressure.”

Why Chile is adding a third lens to place brand measurement

While the precise metrics are evolving, the effort to understand how your place brand strategy is being received by internal and external audiences is not a new endeavour for place brand and marketing teams. In 2026, however, there’s a new audience to consider: how does Generative AI perceive you?

Marca Chile, the Chilean nation brand team, recently conducted a study to understand how AI systems describe the country. The team analysed 200 responses from Gemini and ChatGPT across 50 different prompts that simulated what international audiences might be asking about Chile across five key dimensions and in both English and Spanish.

“Two things stood out that we think every place brand leader should now be measuring,” explained Constanza Rojas Bravo, Marca Chile. “First, AI is already a reputational actor in its own right, because it organises, ranks, and consolidates a narrative about your place, independent of your campaigns or social channels. Second, and more useful operationally: that narrative is traceable to specific sources. That's a measurable, actionable input, not an abstract perception score.”

As people use AI-powered tools more for both research and planning, it’s becoming increasingly clear that AI should be considered an audience in its own right. Chile’s research validated several relevant findings for place leaders. For one, AI’s tendency to consolidate what’s already well-documented online makes it more likely to report legacy strengths than emerging ones. For another, AI is only as strong as the sources it is pulling from, which creates bias in the system – particularly when it comes to multilingual queries and content.

“Our takeaway at Marca Chile is that what you publish today, on the sites that AI is already citing, genuinely shapes how your place will be described tomorrow,” Constanza continued. “That makes AI tracking less a monitoring exercise and more a live editorial opportunity.”

A number of place leaders re-iterated the importance of considering AI as a reputational actor in its own right, calling for place practitioners to create replicable tests around how your place is represented in AI. Ideally, this should feature questions that reference your place directly, but also those where you would expect your country to show up naturally to identify strategic gaps. For example, if you don’t show up in an AI-generated response for the top countries investing in green technology when that’s a strategic pillar, then you need to start influencing the material that the AI is drawing from.

“People may increasingly form opinions about a place without ever visiting a website or engaging directly with branded content,” suggested Claire Prentice, Head of Brand, Marketing & Campaigns for Brand Scotland at Scottish Government. “Understanding how people discover information and form perceptions in an AI-driven world is something I think we’ll all be grappling with over the next few years.”

AI as actor, audience, and team member

Of course, AI is more than just a reputational actor; it’s also rapidly becoming a part of standard operating processes, particularly relating to data analysis. Measuring the impact of your place brand by its very nature requires a huge breadth of extremely varied data sources. As Claire Prentice, Brand Scotland, told us, “no single metric can tell the whole story; it’s really about understanding the full journey.”

Place leaders are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to process oceans of data to better understand the short and long-term effect of their work. But what are the pros and cons of using AI as part of your place brand tracking and measurement processes? We’ve summarised some of the key insights from our CNP Global speakers.

Advantages

• Budget: “For places with limited budgets, AI can expand analytical capacity – especially in multilingual monitoring, competitor benchmarking, and rapid testing of campaign narratives,” explained Lithuania’s Marius Gurskas.
• Volume of data: “AI is particularly useful when monitoring how a city is discussed across thousands of articles, posts, or online discussions in multiple languages. For Helsinki Partners, it helps us understand where Helsinki is showing up, what topics are driving attention and how conversations differ across markets and channels. AI can reveal patterns that human analysts might otherwise miss,” shared Leena Lassila, Director of Visitor & Talent Attraction for Helsinki Partners.
• Speed: By virtue of its access to real-time data, “[AI] identifies emerging themes, sentiment shifts, and reputation analysis much quickly than manual analysis,” said David Gilbert, Destination Cleveland.
• Better predictive abilities: “[AI] is useful for detecting weak signals, emerging narratives, misinformation, and shifts in tone before they become mainstream,” shared Lithuania’s Marius Gurskas.

Disadvantages

• Misdirecting your attention: “The biggest risk is measuring what is easiest to measure, rather than what matters most,” advised Helsinki Partners’ Leena Lassila.
• Nuance is lost in translation: “AI tools are incapable of capturing cultural nuances, complex territorial dynamics, and the human context. AI measures keyword frequencies, but it is blind to the authenticity of a participatory process — it cannot evaluate whether the development of a brand respects and values the knowledge of Brazil’s local communities, such as Indigenous peoples, Quilombolas, and local artisans,” explained Embratur’s Lilás Cajueiro do Nascimento.
• Biased results: “There is a risk of over-relying on what is visible online: the people generating the most digital content are not necessarily representative of residents, visitors, or other important audiences,” shared The Hague & Partners’ Marco Esser.
• Overreliance: “Organisations can become overly reliant on automated insights and lose important context that comes from community engagement, focus groups, and stakeholder discussions,” outlined Destination Cleveland’s David Gilbert.

The magic of human insight

Whether you’re using AI or not, our speakers made one thing clear: you cannot understate the importance of humans to translate complex data into tangible, valuable insights for your place brand and marketing teams. 

As Brand Scotland’s Claire Prentice summarised, “place branding is about people, culture, and identity, and those things are, by their very nature, nuanced. AI can help identify patterns, but it can’t always explain the reasons behind it. I’d see AI as a complement to robust research, rather than a replacement for it.”

How are cities, regions, and countries rethinking place brand KPIs? That's the question that we're exploring at the workshop on November 4th, ahead of the City Nation Place Global conference. Register today to reshape the way you demonstrate your impact to stakeholders and to learn from other place leaders tackling the same challenge.