The new contest in corporate communications begins after the press release has been read, indexed and forgotten. Somebody asks an AI assistant whether a company can be trusted. The machine replies in complete sentences, with the serene confidence of a maître d’ who has misplaced the reservation book. Charlie Wilkie wants to know what happens in between.
For most of his career, Wilkie has worked in that in-between space: where an editorial idea meets a business model, where social purpose confronts the appetite of the feed, and where distribution decides whether good work travels or merely sits. He is now chief executive of 3BL, a communications company focused on sustainability and social impact. Its recent product, an AI Visibility Tracker, asks how major AI systems describe a brand, which sources they rely on and how that description compares with competitors.
The product sounds new because the machinery is new. The underlying problem is old. Institutions want attention, but attention is a rather flighty dinner guest. Wilkie has spent nearly two decades trying to persuade it to stay for the serious conversation.
“For years we’ve measured attention. Rankings. Traffic. Reach. AI adds a new dimension. Representation.”Charlie Wilkie
A commercial education in serious stories
Wilkie’s route began in sales, not in the customary fog of executive destiny. He joined Guardian News & Media in 2008 to lead conference and events sales. By 2011, he had become commercial head and co-founder of the Guardian’s global sustainable-business platform. The title contains the argument: sustainability journalism needed an audience, but it also needed an economic structure that would keep the lights on.
That role grew into senior vice president positions in sponsorship and Guardian Labs. In 2015, a partnership between the Guardian and Ben & Jerry’s tried comedy as an entry point to climate change. Wilkie’s explanation was brisk: the subject often felt overwhelming, conventional engagement was not doing enough, and humor might turn awareness into action. It was purpose with an ear for human reluctance. Even the planet, apparently, benefits from a decent opening line.
In 2016, he joined Upworthy as vice president of sales. He later became chief revenue officer and then CEO of the parent group that included Upworthy and GOOD. The brands belonged to an optimistic chapter of digital media, full of conviction that stories about social good could flourish online. The commercial task was harder than the sentiment. While there, his team secured partnerships with national companies including Dick’s Sporting Goods, Johnson & Johnson and L’Oréal.
His next large newsroom was HuffPost, where he became chief revenue officer in 2019. The publication launched HuffPost Plus, a reader-membership program, during his tenure. Again the assignment paired public-interest journalism with the less poetic business of paying for it. Wilkie’s résumé can be read as a sequence of brands. More usefully, it is a sequence of systems built to let mission and money remain in the same room without throwing crockery.
The walk that became a shop
Then came a smaller experiment, and perhaps the most revealing one. After nearly a decade in New York, Wilkie returned during the pandemic to Canterbury, his hometown. Independent shops had closed. Seasonal markets were disappearing. His cousin Liz Wellstead, a screen printer and teacher, told him about local artists spending too much time wrestling with commerce and too little time making art.
During a walk through some fields, he asked Wellstead what she would do if she could do anything. She wanted a print studio and lifestyle shop. Seven weeks later, their conversation had become Rock Paper Scissors: a physical shop, an online store and a community designed to give makers affordable space, marketing support and a story around their work.
The scale was local; the operating instinct was familiar. Wilkie handled sales, marketing and e-commerce while Wellstead brought artistic knowledge, local relationships and taste. More than 50 people helped build the space in six weeks. The shop carried work from more than 50 makers across southeast England. Wilkie summed up its commercial philosophy simply: people buy the story behind a product.
There is a useful continuity here. A craft shop, a newsroom and a communications platform all confront the same indignity: worthy work does not distribute itself. Someone has to build the shelf, the page, the partnership or the network that carries it. Romanticism is delightful; rent remains punctual.
From distribution to evidence
Wilkie joined 3BL as chief business officer in late 2022 and became CEO in January 2024. The company credited him with work on a new brand strategy and products, a renewed editorial direction for TriplePundit and an expanded community. Under his stewardship, 3BL moved beyond describing itself as a distribution and analytics platform toward the broader role of a sustainability and impact communications partner.
The distinction matters. Distribution answers where a story goes. Communications intelligence asks what happens when it arrives. 3BL’s Focus offering added audience data, competitive benchmarking, real-time analytics and strategic analysis. The company’s AI Visibility Tracker went further, measuring how brands appear in responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It entered beta in May 2026 and became generally available in July.
Wilkie’s argument is that this is not merely search engine optimization in fashionable clothing. A search dashboard can tell a marketer whether a product appears. A communications leader needs to know whether an investor, journalist or procurement team receives an accurate account of the company’s governance, values and credibility. The difference between visibility and representation is the difference between appearing in the room and being properly introduced.
The tracker therefore exposes the evidence behind its scores. It compares query coverage, position and share of voice, and lets teams inspect the prompts, model answers and citations. Its sentiment system also attempts to distinguish between criticism of a topic and criticism of the company mentioned beside it. That sounds like a technical detail until one remembers that reputations have been ruined by cruder misunderstandings.
“AI has already formed an opinion of your brand. Most companies don’t know what it is.”Charlie Wilkie
The proposition also contains a challenge to communicators. Models cannot quote coverage that was never generated. An immaculate corporate website is not the whole public record. AI answers are assembled from what has been published, distributed, cited and repeated across the open web. If the evidence is absent, a better prompt cannot summon it into history.
The cheerful pragmatist
Wilkie’s public style is earnest without being solemn. When he announced his promotion to 3BL CEO, he did not reach for a mountaintop metaphor. He told a story about a team cleanup of a bike path and fields near the company’s Northampton office. The volunteers encountered snakes eating rats, unexpected wildlife and discarded needles. Nobody backed down. Wilkie noted, parenthetically, that some of the shrieks were his.
It is a better leadership anecdote than most because it leaves the mess in. The work was unpleasant, people were human, and they finished it together. That story aligns with 3BL’s stated values: empowered optimism, service, sustainable growth and an invitation to “call in, not out.” Positive reinforcement has limits, but it beats the corporate fashion for scolding audiences into affection.
His outside commitments point in the same direction. Wilkie serves on the board of Streets Ahead Collective, a creative organization focused on confidence, connection and belonging across generations. His family life, noted in his public biography, is near London with his wife Holly, their daughter Scarlett and a dog named Waffle. The dog’s name may be the most efficient protection against executive grandeur yet devised.
What Wilkie appears to want is not a world in which companies speak more loudly. It is one in which they create a credible record, distribute it intelligently and learn how others interpret it. The aspiration is sober: richer information can produce better conversation, and better conversation can build trust. This is not guaranteed. It is work.
The channels will keep changing. Sustainable-business networks gave way to viral feeds, membership products, analytics dashboards and now synthetic answers. Wilkie’s wager has remained remarkably stable. Useful stories need craft, commerce and a route into public life. If the next reader happens to be a machine, the story still has to be true.