In the Age of AI, PR Is Reinforcing Its Role in Brand Visibility

Social media, owned content, influencer marketing and advertising all help brands speak directly to their audiences, tell their own stories and build visibility. Companies have never had so many ways to make their voices heard.

But being visible is one thing. Being talked about by others is another. That is where public relations continue to play a unique role. Media coverage is not simply another communications channel. When a journalist interviews a CEO, reports on a company study, quotes an expert or includes a business in a broader industry trend, the brand enters a conversation it does not control.

Over time, that can help establish expertise, give context to a company’s positioning and strengthen its reputation. In other words, the value of PR goes beyond the coverage itself. It is also about the place a company gradually earns within its industry and the conversations shaping it.

The rise of generative AI adds another dimension to this.

With the growth of ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, the way we search for information is evolving. Where traditional search engines provide links for us to explore, AI-powered answer engines can draw on multiple sources to deliver a synthesized response.

For brands, this raises an interesting question: when an AI system looks for information about your company, what does it find?

An interview with your CEO. An article quoting one of your experts. A company study covered by the press. An analysis that places your business within a wider industry trend. These pieces of coverage do not disappear once they are published. They remain part of the public information available about your company and may, depending on the system and the query, be among the sources AI can access.

News media are among the sources AI uses

There is already evidence of this shift.

In 2025, PR and media intelligence platform Muck RackMuck Rack analyzed more than one million links cited by different AI systems. In its study, 27% of citations came from journalistic content. For prompts relating to current news, that figure rose to 49%.

But there is an important distinction to make: securing media coverage does not guarantee that a brand will be cited or recommended by ChatGPT.

These systems are evolving rapidly, they use different sources, and many factors influence how an answer is generated.

What these figures show is more straightforward: news media are part of the information ecosystem used by AI-powered answer engines. And that matters for PR.

Media coverage has a life beyond publication

Traditionally, we have assessed the value of media coverage through factors such as the relevance and reach of the publication, the visibility achieved and how effectively the company and its messages were represented.

Those measures still matter. But AI gives us another reason to consider what an article leaves behind.

Every relevant piece of media coverage adds to the public information available about a company: its expertise, its leadership, its positioning and the issues on which it has a credible voice.

That does not mean an AI system will necessarily use that information, much less turn it into a recommendation. But the information remains part of the public digital landscape and can continue to be discovered long after the original article was published.

Media coverage is therefore more than a moment of visibility. It also contributes to the editorial footprint a brand builds over time.

Should we tailor PR strategies for ChatGPT consumption?

No. And that is probably the biggest trap to avoid. It would be a little like approaching PR with SEO as the primary objective. Media coverage may well have an impact on a brand’s search visibility, but we do not choose a story, an angle or a spokesperson simply to please Google. We do it because the story has editorial value and brings something useful to journalists and their audiences.

The same principle applies to AI.

The goal should not be to write press releases “optimized for ChatGPT” or generate as many mentions as possible in the hope of influencing an algorithm. It is about continuing to do what good PR has always done: identifying the issues on which a company has something meaningful to contribute, producing useful information, developing credible spokespeople and building a consistent presence in the media that matter to its ecosystem.

We do not do PR for algorithms. But good PR can have an impact far beyond the immediate audience of a piece of coverage.

That was already true with search engines. The emergence of answer engines adds another environment in which information about a brand can potentially be discovered, selected and synthesized.

Ultimately, AI does not change the purpose of PR. If anything, it highlights its value: building a credible editorial presence around a brand and its expertise over time. With one important difference: machines are now reading what is being said about you, too.