5 Ways to Improve Your Brand’s AI Visibility Through PR

The New Rules of Brand Discovery in the AI Era

The way customers find brands has fundamentally changed. With reports from PR.co indicating that a significant portion of Google searches now end without a single click, the old model of driving traffic from results pages is losing its power. This is the reality of zero-click search PR. Brand discovery no longer happens on a list of blue links. It happens when an AI directly answers a user's question and names your brand as the solution.

This creates a new and urgent challenge. If generative AI models do not perceive your brand as a credible, authoritative source, you effectively become invisible at the most critical moment of discovery. Traditional SEO alone is no longer sufficient. To improve AI search visibility, your focus must shift to building ‘machine trust’ by feeding these models with authoritative information through strategic public relations.

Strategy 1: Secure Credibility Through Earned Media

AI models are designed to be skeptical of self-promotion. They learn to trust information that is validated by others, which is why earned media has become a cornerstone of modern PR. An AI weighs a mention in a respected industry journal far more heavily than a statement on your own website. It’s the digital equivalent of a trusted referral.

A Semrush “AI Visibility Index” study highlighted this trend, revealing that brands most frequently mentioned in AI answers are those cited by credible third parties. This confirms that earned media is a powerful driver of machine trust. To get cited by AI, your PR team should focus on building this external validation. The goal is to have respected voices vouch for your expertise.

Here are a few actionable steps:

• Prioritise securing media placements in top-tier, respected industry publications whose content is regularly indexed.
• Focus on getting your executives quoted as experts in relevant news articles and trend analysis pieces.
• Build and maintain genuine relationships with authoritative journalists and thought leaders in your field.

Strategy 2: Publish High-Quality Thought Leadership

While earned media acts as a powerful vote of confidence, it needs something substantive to endorse. This is where high-quality owned content comes in. To increase your brand visibility in AI answers, you must create ‘AI-readable’ assets that serve as a direct, citable source of information. This goes beyond simple blog posts stuffed with keywords. AI models are looking for cohesive, expert-authored content that demonstrates true authority.

Think original research reports, comprehensive white papers, and in-depth articles that offer a unique perspective. This owned content provides the substance and depth that an AI needs to formulate detailed, helpful answers. The real magic happens when these two strategies work together. When a journalist writing for a major publication (earned media) cites your brand’s proprietary report (owned media), it creates a powerful, dual signal of credibility. This synergy is central to effective PR strategies for AI search, proving your brand is not just part of the conversation but is actively leading it.

Strategy 3: Engage Authentically on Community Platforms

Credibility is not just built in newsrooms or corporate blogs. It is also forged in the unfiltered, authentic conversations happening every day on community platforms like Reddit and Quora. AI crawlers increasingly treat the user-generated content on these sites as a form of social proof. They are learning to spot genuine expertise in the wild, away from polished marketing messages.

For brands, this requires a shift in mindset from broadcasting to participating. Instead of pushing a sales pitch, the goal is to engage in genuine conversations by answering industry-specific questions and sharing expertise freely. These interactions generate fresh, context-rich signals that AI models index as evidence of relevance and trustworthiness. Your brand becomes associated with helpfulness, not just commerce.

To implement this, PR teams can:

1. Identify and monitor relevant subreddits and Quora topics where your target audience asks questions.
2. Answer queries with detailed, helpful information that demonstrates your expertise without an immediate call to action.
3. Build a reputation as a valuable community member whose contributions are consistently upvoted and trusted.

Strategy 4: Promote Owned Assets Through PR Channels

Creating a brilliant research report is one thing. Ensuring it becomes a recognised source of truth for AI models is another. This strategy is about the active promotion of your owned content through targeted PR efforts. It is a crucial step that distinguishes passive content creation from strategic information dissemination. The objective is to secure earned media coverage that is specifically about your owned assets, such as a news story covering the key findings of your brand’s latest industry report.

This tactic is especially powerful in a zero-click environment. When an AI summarises an article that discusses your research, it is more likely to credit your brand as the primary source of the information directly within its answer. This creates a clear and authoritative trail back to you. The workflow is straightforward but effective: create a valuable asset, build a PR campaign around its unique findings, and pitch the story to journalists. The resulting coverage serves as an undeniable signal for AI to cite your brand as the authority.

Strategy 5: Align PR with Generative Engine Optimization

Think of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as anticipating the exact question your ideal customer would ask an AI and then crafting the perfect answer. It involves structuring your content to directly address the specific, high-intent queries that users pose to language models. For example, a generic query like ‘best PR firms’ is far less valuable than a high-intent query like ‘how can a B2B tech startup get media coverage for a product launch?’. The second question presents a clear opportunity for a brand to be cited as an authority.

Effective generative engine optimization PR requires teams to structure press releases, pitches, and owned content to directly solve these specific user problems. By mapping your content to the AI's decision-making process for these queries, you are essentially feeding it the exact answers it needs, dramatically increasing the likelihood of being cited. For teams looking to implement these advanced techniques, specialised services like those we offer at Media Boost can help align PR efforts with the technical demands of GEO.

Measuring Success in the Age of AI Search

After implementing these strategies, how do you know if your efforts are working? Traditional SEO metrics like page rankings and website traffic are no longer the full picture. They measure whether someone could find you, not whether an AI trusts you. Measuring AI visibility requires a new dashboard and a new mindset.

The new metrics that matter focus on authority and citation. These include the frequency of your brand’s citations in AI answers, the sentiment of those mentions, and your inclusion in an LLM’s knowledge graph. Ultimately, ‘machine trust’ is the new key performance indicator. Measuring it requires tools and analytics focused on the quality and context of your brand’s presence within AI-generated responses, not just the volume of clicks you receive.

Metric Category	Traditional KPI	AI-Era (GEO) KPI
Reach	Impressions & Website Traffic	Frequency of Brand Citations in AI Answers
Authority	Domain Authority & Backlink Count	Citations from Credible Third-Party Sources
Engagement	Social Shares & Time on Page	Sentiment Analysis of AI Mentions
Conversion	Lead Form Submissions & Clicks	Inclusion in High-Intent, Solution-Oriented Answers