For the past twenty years, the playbook for getting your brand found online was clear and relatively simple: 'Optimise your website for Google.'
This focused brands on building backlinks, tightening your website’s load speed, structuring your content around keywords, and making sure your site was beautifully designed and accessible. Do it well, and you'd earn your spot on page one… and the traffic that came with it.
Now in 2026, we find the game has changed—and this time not because Google changed its ranking algorithm. Your customers are no longer googling for an answer, they’re asking. Even when your customers still reach to Google with a question, Google now places AI responses first, followed by paid advertisements, and then real search data.
I expect you can already relate to this based on your own experience.
If you are looking for something, you probably already use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and you’ll also notice a key difference to Google: if a brand doesn’t appear in the answer, there's no page two to scroll to, and you’re already trusting what and who the AI told you is the best solution.
So how does an AI decide who to recommend? That's where you need to know how these systems actually work and how you can influence the outcome.
Most AI assistants use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In plain terms, when you ask a question, the AI doesn't just rely on what it memorised during training. It retrieves live information from trusted web sources, then generates its answer based on what those sources say.
Traditional SEO asks: 'Which pages deserve to rank?' based on signals like backlinks, page speed, and keywords. AI models ask a completely different question: 'What can I confidently say about this brand, and can I trust it?'
And the sources it trusts most look a lot like a PR portfolio. Independent news coverage. Industry publications. Awards and recognition. Analyst commentary. Interviews where your experts explain what your business does and why it matters. When an AI finds a journalist has written about your work, that carries far more weight than your own homepage saying the same thing—for the same reason it always has in PR: a third party said it, so it's credible.
This has always been PR’s strong point. Experts in Public Relations know who the most trusted sources in media are and have the relationships to secure coverage. A strong news story about a client project. A founder quoted as an expert in a national masthead. An industry award with coverage to match. A radio or podcast interview transcribed and indexed online. Each of these is a trusted, retrievable, third-party account of your business.
This is precisely what will help your AI relevance increase.
While your website remains essential, conversion-optimised pages and flashy design don't mean much to an AI. An AI model never sees your site the way a human does, and it certainly can't reproduce visual flair in a chat session. Your brand is now represented by whatever credible, written material exists about you online. If the only material out there is your own marketing copy, the AI has very little to work with and even less reason to trust it.
If you run a business, the question to ask is no longer just 'do we rank?' but 'what would an AI say about us?' Try it. Ask a few AI assistants who the leading providers are in your space and see whether you appear. If you're invisible or misrepresented, the fix usually isn't more keywords. It's more credible coverage.
If you're an SEO or digital agency, this is the moment to reach out to a PR agency. The technical work you do—such as site structure, content, schema, performance—remains essential, but on its own, it can't generate the trusted third-party signals that AI answers are built on. The agencies that will keep delivering results for clients through this shift are the ones pairing search expertise with earned media strategy.
The budget tug-of-war between Marketing and PR within organisations is age-old, with performance marketing often swallowing the lion's share. But as search shifts from algorithm rankings to AI answers, rebalancing your budget toward earned media isn't just nice to have—it's survival.
Want to know how your brand stacks up in the age of AI search? Download our 5-Minute AI Visibility Checklist to run your own audit, see what ChatGPT and Gemini are telling your customers, and find out where your earned media gaps are.
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