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.