If you work in SEO or marketing, you’ve probably been hearing a whole lot about AI search lately and what it means for visibility. And honestly, a lot of the conversation is either overly technical or weirdly apocalyptic about the future of organic traffic.
So let’s talk about what’s actually going on, what it means for your brand, and why digital PR (when done properly) is one of the best things you can invest in right now.
- Authenticity still matters, but now it’s about proof. People want to see who’s actually done the work, not just talk about it.
- Founder and team-led content is outperforming traditional brand posts, especially on social where algorithms are favouring people over brands.
- Your team is one of your strongest marketing assets, real people and their stories are going to connect much more than a graphic.
- The future of marketing is people. Keep your strategy, just don’t forget to put some actual humans in it.
What “understanding” your brand really means for AI
To get why AI cites certain brands and not others, you need to understand how it actually processes information.
LLMs (the tech behind these tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) don’t read the internet the way you or I do. They take enormous amounts of text and convert it into something called embeddings, which are essentially representations of words and concepts that get mapped in a kinda semantic space. In that space, topics that are related to each other sit close together, and topics that aren’t related sit far apart.
Think of it like a cluster map where “headphones” and “audio quality” are neighbours, and “headphones” and “tax returns are on opposite ends of the room.
What this means is that the more your brand appears alongside the topics and categories you want to show up for (across a range of credible, third-party sources, that is), the more strongly LLMs associate you with those topics.
For example, when McKay’s Solicitors got featured in Proctor, the Queensland Law Society’s newsletter, for hosting a high school moot competition, that coverage was placing them in the semantic neighbourhood of “criminal law,” “regional legal community,” and “Queensland law”, in a very credible publication.
Every time a credible source mentions them in that context, the association between their brand and those topics gets stronger. So when someone asks an AI tool to recommend a solicitor in Mackay, McKays has a much better chance of being part of that answer.
See where it says “local reputation”? Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about, and it goes far beyond what the Google reviews are saying.
Why brand authority is more important than ever
AI tools aren’t just asking, “Is this page relevant to the query?” They’re asking, “Is this brand or person consistently recognised, talked about, and trusted in this space?” And that’s a very different question to answer.
It’s less about a single piece of content or coverage and more about the overall picture your brand paints across the web. Pretty much, if you asked ten people who the best running shoe brand is and nine of them said Nike without hesitating, that’s authority. AI is essentially trying to replicate that same gut-check, just at scale and across millions of sources.
And the best way to build that kind of authority is to show up as a trusted expert in your space, speaking with real insight and experience, alongside a few other things that support your broader marketing strategy, such as:
- Consistent brand messaging across every channel, so AI can clearly understand who you are and what you do
- Personal branding, because people recognise people, and that trust carries across to your business
- Active social media, keeping your brand visible and part of the conversation
- Reviews and directory listings, reinforcing legitimacy through external validation
- And digital PR, which brings all of this together and is arguably the most direct lever you can pull
What the data is telling us
Everything we’ve just talked about, how AI builds associations, how authority is formed across multiple sources, isn’t just theory. There’s now data backing it up.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews to understand what actually correlates with AI visibility, and it changed how people approach AI search forever.
Digital PR used to be so focused on backlink count and domain authority, and look, those things are definitely still important in the grand scheme of things, but they aren’t the driving force behind AI visibility. That title goes to brand mentions, aka, the number of times your brand is talked about across the web.
And honestly, this surprised me too. There was a time when landing coverage without a link felt like a bit of a shallow win, but nowadays I treat an unlinked mention as just as valuable as that little blue hyperlink.
Ahrefs found that, above traditional metrics like DR and referring domains, the strongest correlations with AI visibility were:
- YouTube mentions:
- YouTube mention impressions
- Brand web mentions
- Brand anchors
- Branded search volume
And if you look at that list, it’s not really about technical SEO or keywords at all; it’s about visibility, recognition, and being part of the conversation. Which is exactly what Digital PR does when it’s done properly.
High-quality coverage beats volume every time
Not all mentions are created equal, and this is where a lot of brands go wrong.
If brand mentions are the signal AI is paying attention to, it’s tempting to treat it as a volume game. More coverage means more mentions, which means more visibility, sounds simple right? And look, some agencies will absolutely sell you that story. But the quality and context of where you’re mentioned matters just as much as how often.
Being cited in an established industry publication, a well-regarded trade newsletter, or a media outlet with real editorial standards is much more effective than appearing in a generic “top 50 tools” roundup that exists purely for the backlinks.
AI is trained on patterns of credibility, so when your brand shows up in sources that already carry authority, that association compounds over time. When it shows up in spammy, low-effort content? That compounds too, just not in the direction you want.
Back to basics (kind of)
So if there’s one thing to take from all of this, it’s this:
This isn’t really about AI. It’s about what AI is rewarding.
And if you’ve been around SEO for a while, this might feel a bit like déjà vu. Think back to the early days of Google; it was largely a volume game. More keywords, more pages, more links, the better. Then came updates like Panda and Penguin, and suddenly it wasn’t about who could game the system the hardest, but about who actually deserved to be there.
The brands that had been cutting corners were penalised, and those doing things properly were rewarded. We’ve seen this cycle play out before, but now it’s just happening in a slightly different way.
AI doesn’t really care how perfectly a page is optimised, I mean, it does to an extent, but it’s paying attention to the bigger picture. Where your brand shows up, who’s talking about you, and what you keep getting linked to in conversation.
That’s why this doesn’t feel entirely new, it feels more like things snapping back to what good marketing has always been about. Being known, being credible, and being part of the right conversations.
Digital PR just happens to be one of the fastest ways to make that happen.
Need a hand with your digital PR strategy? We’d love to chat 👋
