If you want to succeed in search, you need to tackle all three aspects.
Jonathan Futa is co-founder of Group RFZ.
Search has changed more in the last five years than it has in the last 20, and it’s about to change again. Adobe reports 52% of consumers believe AI will replace traditional search engines for product searches within five years. Whether that’s a bold forecast or a premature obituary for Google, one thing is clear – AI search is reshaping how people discover brands, products and stories, and communications professionals need to take notice.
For PR professionals, this means search optimization no longer rests just with marketing, it’s also a communications strategy. But AI search is just one piece of the story. Winning visibility takes mastering all three heads of the modern search beast — AI, social and traditional.
Making sense of the new search landscape
Just a short time ago, experts predicted that social search — consumers turning to Instagram, TikTok or YouTube for answers — would overtake traditional search. That shift slowed when AI platforms exploded onto the scene, but social search remains a powerful force shaping how consumers research, discover and decide.
Today’s search behavior is a combination of the three. Consumers might begin their search using an AI chatbot, corroborate results with Google and then go to social media to validate their choices. Each step serves a different and important purpose in the customer journey, and PR teams must ensure their brand shows up in all of them.
Capitalizing on PR’s AEO edge
According to an Acquia survey, 70% of marketers expect answer engine optimization to reshape digital strategy. That’s good news for PR because, unlike paid search, AI-driven answer engines prioritize authoritative third-party content such as earned media.
PR teams can strengthen AEO by structuring their earned and owned content, such as blogs, contributed articles and FAQs, so that it’s easily understood and surfaced by AI crawlers. The focus should be less on keywords and more on clear, accurate and credible content. When creating or updating content, aim to answer the questions that people are likely to ask AI directly rather than just what they might search on Google.
For instance, if a brand like Clorox publishes a blog post titled “Ways to Safely Disinfect a Kitchen After Food Prepping,” writes it in a Q&A form and links to citations from industry experts, AI engines such as Perplexity and Google SGE are more likely to reference the content in a query asking “What’s the best way to disinfect my kitchen after preparing chicken?”
Don’t overlook social search’s staying power
Social search occupies a unique place in the customer journey that AI can’t easily replace because it’s built on trust and human connection. Consumers believe other people more than platforms or algorithms.
This makes creator marketing vital in the new search ecosystem because it sits at the intersection of trust, influence and engagement. Consumers are turning to TikTok before Google to make decisions on what to buy or which brands to trust, making it an instrumental part of the customer journey.
It also makes it that much more important to partner with influencers who are truly aligned with your brand and can authentically tell your story. Their content can not only drive engagement, but also help AI platforms learn about your brand.
Using creators to strengthen AEO results
For now, AI-search models currently pull heavily from forums — namely Reddit — rather than from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. However, creator content can impact discoverability, so it deserves a place in every influencer marketing strategy.
On top of restructuring your earned media for AEO visibility, evolve your creator strategy to:
- Expand into Reddit conversations by pinpointing the subreddits that are relevant to your brand and ask creators to authentically respond to questions, offer expertise and naturally allude to your brand.
- Urge creators to convert their content into Substack posts, articles or even videocast transcripts that AI has an easier time reading than visuals or videos.
- Repurpose your creators’ content into FAQs, blog posts or written overviews other that AI can crawl and tie back to your brand.
The AI discovery and social validation meeting-point
The real power of social content lies in how it drives social search. Understanding how social, AI-driven and traditional search differ is key to building a cohesive strategy. Many assume that when an AI chatbot gives a recommendation, the journey ends there — but that’s rarely true. Those zero-click moments often spark a new round of searches that are simply harder to trace.
Imagine a consumer asking an AI platform for “birthday gift ideas for my partner.” After a short chat, the AI may suggest a facial moisturizer and recommend four options. Rather than immediately purchasing one, they get on TikTok or YouTube to check out their reviews and see how a product actually works, not just how it’s described. In this scenario, the creator and social content close the deal.
To win in today’s search environment, brands need both an AEO strategy that gets AI to recommend their products, and a creator content that convinces people to buy when they start searching AI’s suggestions.
A new playbook for communicators
The rise of AI search doesn’t replace social or traditional search. Instead, it amplifies the need for PR pros to build integrated strategies that cover all three.
That means:
● Optimizing for AI: Repurpose earned and owned content into clear, structured FAQs and authoritative resources
● Leveraging creators: Partner with trusted voices who influence both human audiences and, eventually, AI models
● Protecting reputation: Remember that what AI says about your brand is shaped by the coverage, reviews and commentary it finds
While search used to be an SEO challenge, it’s now shifted to become a communications issue. PR is no longer about being visible and trusted among humans, it’s also about being seen and trusted by machines.
The post AEO, social and traditional: PR’s guide to the new three-headed search beast appeared first on PR Daily.
