December 12, 2025 | Rhiannon Day
Since generative AI went mainstream a little over two years ago, there’s been nothing short of a transformation in the ways people search for and find information online. Google now provides AI overviews for 20% of all queries. Overall search numbers have increased, too. And, worrying for many businesses, click-through rates have plummeted.
This upheaval of the online topography could reasonably scare some businesses into feeling they’re being left out and left behind. The rate of change could lead to their digital KPIs dropping, reflecting likely damage to sales and brand presence. Many are therefore looking for ways to adapt.
But to turn away from traditional PR would be hasty. What’s more, you’d be abandoning one of the most important tools at your disposal for meaningfully shaping the output of the GenAI search and chatbots now used daily.
In other words, traditional PR is more than simply ‘still relevant’ in a new era of AI – for reasons old and new…
Life beyond search
Your communications reach far beyond search. Yes, it’s the gateway through which a large share of your audience may find you on their journey to your products and services. However, search is only one channel among the many that are important to your business’s goals. By also focusing on these non-search channels, you ensure a holistic and resilient communications strategy.
PR works in numerous channels – like social media, industry events, and traditional media – impacting the behaviour of customers, investors, and policymakers. For example, a positive article in a key trade publication might influence a B2B purchasing decision more than a search result would, and consistent media coverage can sway investor confidence or help shape regulatory policy that’s beneficial to your operations.
The human decision-maker still exists: the person using AI search to research vendors still makes the final decision. Seeing your CEO quoted in the FT, or your CTO speaking at a major conference creates trust that no AI summary can manufacture. PR builds the credibility signals that matter when it’s time to sign the contract.
The narrative
Shaping ‘the narrative’ is as important as ever. What, how, who, and when you say something help to set the parameters of the public conversation. What people are saying – and therefore thinking – about your business helps to bring about the results you want. Clear, consistent and credible communications can do exactly that.
This is what PR does that AI cannot. AI reflects back the current conversation, while PR actively plays a role in determining the Overton Window on a given topic. So, by the time GenAI is summarising what’s being said about an issue online, companies with strong PR have already determined which ideas are setting the agenda, and which will be pushed to the margins.
Authority as currency
The authority of your brand traditionally elevates your company in a customer’s mind, helping to establish your market presence and remove friction from the sales funnel. It now also increases the likelihood that your content will be used and cited in GenAI search results. In fact, the large language models (LLMs) powering GenAI search LOVE brand authority.
Earned media will always be a leading way to build your brand authority; such is the power of coverage from respectable outlets.
But authority signals are changing online. To date, search engines like Google have judged the authority of your website heavily on backlinks – inbound links to your pages from other sites. In an age of ‘training data’, however, links are less important. LLMs are trained on large collections of text, not on the profile of all the interlinking websites online. During training, the model learns statistical patterns in the text itself – patterns of words, phrases, code etc. – rather than counting incoming links or calculating link‑based authority scores. Therefore, band mentions, narrative and context have a much greater importance to LLMs: the more you show up in the training data, within the right context and with the right narrative, the greater your authority to the resulting model. Getting this visibility requires investment in communication.
Message discipline
With AI summarising and synthesising existing information, having consistent, well-distributed, and focused messaging across multiple credible sources becomes even more critical. It’s more likely to mean that when someone searches your brand or services, AI search draws on information that says what your company wants it to say – based on what your audience needs to hear.
LLMs are purely statistical engines, generating each word in a sentence based on the previous ones. When thought of this way, ensuring you employ strong message discipline ensures that the odds of your brand, products or services being included in a relevant GenAI search result increase – whether the search engine was asked about your sector, your business, or your competitors.
Consider how this would play out in practice. If your communications routinely put out inconsistent messaging, which is then fed into an LLM’s training data, the result is more likely to be confused. Whereas if you’ve consistently put out the same strong messaging, AI will encounter it in its training data, and is more likely to use that phrasing when it generates answers.
The quality filter problem: because of the risk of ‘AI slop’ infecting and ruining the internet, AI models are increasingly being trained to prioritise high-quality, authoritative sources over generic web content. Traditional PR gets you into exactly those sources; the tier-one publications, industry press, and respected platforms that carry more weight when it comes to verifying data and creating quality results.
Feeding the foundations and building beyond
Traditional PR isn’t competing with AI search; it’s feeding it. If you can recognise and take advantage of that, you can ensure you’re communicating the authoritative, consistent messages that shape what AI says about you. Meanwhile, PR continues to do what it’s always done best – build trust, set the agenda, and open doors that generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) just can’t.
Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you navigate the new world of AI.
