AI Archives - Change Communications

The Radical Re-Valuation of PR in the Age of AI

Why the era of AI search is a boon for anyone who understands the art of the pitch

The current panic around AI search (also known as AEO or GEO) has created a gold rush for snake oil salesmen promising companies that they can game the system like it was SEO. But the fundamental mechanics of AEO/GEO (Google AI and Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity et al) are just a digital mirror of what PR professionals have been doing for decades.

All those frantic LinkedIn posts about AI indexing strategies are repeating the strategies that a good PR plan has. Some PR agencies are trying to slap a fancy label on it and package it as something shiny and new. That’s typical PR spin, and unnecessary. Most PR agencies are definitely doing things a little differently, and adding tactics to earned media strategies, but they aren’t reinventing the wheel.

That doesn’t mean that we PR pros are AI experts or that we have the recipe for a magical formula. And no, we won’t sell you snake oil, unless you really want to set your money on fire. It just means that AI search is pulling from the same sources that PR pros have been pitching for decades.

The Machine Reads Like an Editor, Not a Crawler

For decades, when SEO was all the rage, it became a fruitless game of feeding the spider. You optimized H1 tags, you stuffed keywords, you built backlink, often from anywhere, regardless of quality (all those spam emails you’d get from some nebulous sources offering backlinks? Yeah, those) . The algorithm was a mathematical equation that could presumably be solved with enough volume aka money.

AI search is different. It’s trained on vast language models that are designed to mimic human editorial judgment.

When ChatGPT or Claude decides whether to cite your brand as the answer to “What’s the best CRM for enterprise AI startups,” it isn’t just counting how many other sites link to you. It’s evaluating the Big 3C’s: Consensus, Context, Credibility.

Consensus: Is your brand mentioned across multiple, trusted publications? It can’t just be mentioned in one or two random blogs, it has to shown up reliably in established media outlets. Consensus can also be interpreted as consistent, consistent and timely mentions in media outlets.
Context: Are you discussed in the Wall Street Journal in a feature article about industry trends, or is your brand one of dozens on a listicle-style review website?
Credibility: Who is vouching for you? No, your mom doesn’t count (unless her name is Kara Swisher).

This is the exact same strategy that PR professionals have deployed for decades.

The Traditional PR Playbook is The AI Playbook

As someone whose career began in traditional public relations, in the days when broadcast newsrooms still asked you to fax them your pitch for their morning meetings, the current chaos has become a massive competitive advantage for those of us who understand the earned media funnel.

In PR, you email a reporter, not a chatbot or search engine. You know that a pitch only works if it serves the reader, not your client.

Today’s AI models are trained to detect that same human value. They penalize content that is clearly just brand propaganda. They reward content that is newsworthy. A byline in an industry trade pub still outweighs 100 AI-generated blog posts on your own domain. Why? Because the AI sees the masthead as a proxy for trust.

The Data Doesn’t Lie: AI Loves Newsrooms

Look at any AI Overview result for a complex B2B query. You’ll rarely see a random startup’s homepage. You will, however, see citations from established media outlets. This is because most AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been trained on The Common Crawl, which heavily weights journalistic integrity.

If you want to be the answer that the AI spits out, you need to become the story that the journalist writes.

Stop Optimizing. Start Storytelling.

If you’re a founder or a marketing leader worried about AI eating your search traffic, stop asking optimization and start asking about what data you have access to that a reporter would find interesting. Or think about the POV that would be controversial and a reporter would want to hear.

The future of search visibility belongs to the best communicator. It’s why jobs with “Storyteller” in it are now in hot demand. Same old playbook, just a different name.

It’s time to dust off the AP Stylebook and start pitching reporters like the good ole days of PR. Just keep that fax machine unplugged, though. We’re not quite that analog. Yet.

PR in the Age of AI: How to Make Sure Your Brand Shows Up

Before ChatGPT and their ilk took over all of our lives, the first thing that clients would ask us was: “How can I get on the front page of The New York Times?” Now, the question we frequently get is: “How can my brand show up on ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude?”

Interestingly, both of these questions have the same exact answer: It’s the tried and true methods that have always worked in PR. It takes a lot more effort now than it did back then. You have to mix and match your tactics in a way that you never had to (earned media is never enough nowadays), you have to get creative with the stories you tell to stand above the rest (data helps), and you can never put all of your media eggs in one basket. A healthy 360-degree approach is generally the best answer. But ultimately, it’s about telling the right story, not necessarily the best one, but the right one for the right time.

Any PR person who actually knows how to write a pitch that media appreciates will tell you the same. And all of the PR snake oil salesmen who always pop up with every new trend (Hello, NFTs! Hello, blockchain!) will try to sell you a bill of goods that are ultimately worthless. You cannot buy your way into AI search, though you can certainly try.

But if you want to show up in ChatGPT in the way that you actually want, you’ll need to build up your brand storytelling elements, one by one, and create that drumbeat narrative. This strategy is again no different than a traditional earned media strategy. But it does take more than it used to, and there are a lot more things to be weary of.

The latest shift comes with a large amount of risk. AI can confidently repeat low-quality information, misinformation, or AI hallucinations, especially when there’s a lot of noise online. We all know that AI is far from perfect and can frequently provide very wrong information in a way that Google Search rarely did. This is a serious issue that has to put all brand owners on their toes. But just like you could never fully scrub negative articles from Google, you can only train AI models to know more about your brand through traditional PR methods. This is where those snake oil salespeople will again try to get you to part with your money.

Reputation management is tricky and can be frustrating because you can’t always control your brand’s narrative. What you can control is the story you tell, and the information that you disseminate. Focusing on what you can control is where your brand will make the most impact. It’s why the industry is seeing a lot of job titles pop up where “storytelling” and “brand narrative” are front and center, as a recent Wall Street Journal article illuminated. These job titles are new but their roles are the same as it ever was: good old-fashioned PR.

A 2025 report from MuckRack claims that AI search pulls from recent articles, so maintaining a schedule of news announcements and content is key to ensure AI answers are pulling from recent and relevant articles (and again, not hallucinating).

The same report from MuckRack revealed that AI pulls from sources that it has access to, especially higher-credibility news outlets, reputable mentions, structured company pages, and consistent third-party validation. Again, all methods that come from traditional PR tactics.

To understand AEO is to understand PR.

Written by Katy L.

The Human Problem

Last year, I had the absolute joy (and occasional existential crisis) of directing a short audio play called “The Human Problem” for The Living in the Future podcast.

The play was written over a year ago by Don Smith, likely before half your interactions were arguing about AI. It imagines an AI system at the center of a prediction-market–style ecosystem and debates what happens when we outsource more and more judgment to a machine. Basically, ideas that seemed slightly far-fetched even just one year ago are now firmly in our daily discussions. Terrifying? Exhilarating? You be the judge. But give it a listen, which you can do here: https://www.livinginthefuture.rocks/e/episode-12-audio-play-the-human-problem/

I’m enormously proud of the work that the wonderful actors and sound designer put in to bring Don’s words to life.

And yes, doing PR is very similar to directing.

The brilliant creative team:

Written by Don Smith

Produced by Sunshine Lampitoc Smith

Sound Designer: Wesley Apfel, using Pixabay

Dean Williams: Zack Graham

Host: Kelli Dawn Hancock

William Barstow: DW McCann

Steven Dorvan and Time Announcements: Erik Patterson

Written by Katy L.

Unpacking the AI Revolution in Marketing: Cheap Thrills or Sustainable Growth?

Thanks to the increased sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) tools now available in marketing, it’s easier than ever to write copy, generate content, and most importantly for brands, to optimize search engines using AI. This may be good news for smaller brands who don’t have the budget to compete against deeper pocketed-brands in the ever expensive SEO race, but is it good news for the larger public and marketers in general? If using AI to gamify the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) system is the business equivalent of eating instant ramen- cheap, easy, and good for consumers’ short-term attention span, what does this mean for the long-term health, growth, and results?

In order to understand how AI can manipulate search engines, let’s explore how Google and other search engines use AI in search. When people talk about search engine algorithms, they’re talking about how search results are being delivered and how easily findable they are. However, Google and other search engines are based on an interconnected series of web-powered signals that powers where these search engine results are appearing, how they’re appearing, and what type of search results are appearing (source: Marketing AI Institute).

So how are people utilizing AI to game SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing)? With AI, search engines utilizing LLMs (Language Learning Models) could “dynamically adjust the richness and type of information provided based on multiple variables such as query specifics, user profile, location, and time.“ Bad actors can “work the system” by creating fake news or fake data and arranging it in such a way that the search engine’s LLM will think it’s authentic enough to prime the search results in a desirable way for the short term (e.g. first page Google search results.) However, when these fake news and/or fake data aren’t corroborated, the LLM will realize that they aren’t legitimate and cease showing them in the search results.

This essentially means the potential to game consumers’ short attention span is higher than ever with the advent of AI and necessitates the need for brands and public relations professionals to firmly hold and manage their digital reputation. Editors will still need to fact check sources before letting AI instant publish, and brands will need to integrate branded keywords into other credible sources like whitepapers, research papers, and infographics in order to maintain a high level of trust with search engines.

Essentially the end lesson is this: while it may be tempting for marketers to produce fast food-like digital marketing results using AI for search engines, in the long term to retain trust, they’ll need to do the hard work of proving credibility with a lengthy digital footprint, integrated marketing communications, and third party approval (rankings, awards, back linking.)

Written by Courtney L.