Your Brand Has a New Audience: The Algorithm

Ask most executives who their most important audiences are, and you'll hear the same answers: customers, journalists, investors, employees....

All correct. All incomplete.

There's a new audience shaping how your brand gets discovered and evaluated — one that never sleeps, never reads your press release, and doesn't care about your latest campaign. It's the algorithm. Specifically, the AI systems (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) that millions of people now turn to instead of Google when they're researching a company, a product, or a solution.

If those systems don't know you, trust you, or cite you, you may not be part of the conversation at all.

The Shift That's Already Happened

Here's something that surprised even me: AI-referred web sessions jumped over 500% in 2025. And somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of B2B buyers now say they consult AI systems as part of how they research vendors.

Think about what that means in practice. When someone Googles your brand, they get a list of links and decide what to click. When someone asks ChatGPT about a solution you offer, they get a paragraph of a synthesized answer that may or may not mention you. That answer has become your new first impression. And most brands have no idea it's happening.

What AI Actually Rewards

This is where it gets interesting for anyone in communications.

AI systems don't care about your keyword strategy or how many backlinks your website has. What they reward is authority — being mentioned consistently, across credible and independent sources, in a way that's clear and specific enough to be understood and surfaced.

Sound familiar? That's what good PR has always done.

One strong placement in a publication that AI models trust, a major trade outlet, an industry analyst report, a credible byline, can do more for your visibility in AI-generated answers than a dozen smaller hits. This is why the emerging discipline around this, called Generative Engine Optimization or GEO, is fundamentally a PR discipline.

You can't buy your way into AI citations with paid media, and you can't engineer your way in with technical tweaks. You earn it, the same way you've always earned credibility.

Why Waiting Is Risky

The brands building AI visibility right now are pulling ahead, and it compounds. AI systems favor recent coverage this means that content from the past six months carries more weight. Brands that show up consistently, with a clear story, across authoritative sources, are the ones getting cited. The ones that aren't? They're simply not in the answer.

By the end of 2026, I think we'll look back and see a pretty clear line between brands that got ahead of this and brands that didn't. The ones on the wrong side won't just have missed some traffic. They'll have been left out of the consideration set entirely.

What To Do About It

The good news is you don't need to start from scratch. You need to think about what you're already doing, and why it matters more now than ever.

Every story you place in a credible outlet is feeding the systems that shape how your buyers discover you. Every expert voice you position, every piece of original research you publish, every consistent message you put into the world and it all signals to AI systems that your brand is worth citing.

If your messaging is muddled or inconsistent, the algorithm will either misrepresent you or skip you. If your media relations strategy has gone quiet, you're losing ground to competitors who haven't.

Earned media was never just about readers. Now it's about training the systems that will introduce your brand to buyers you'll never see coming.

One Last Thought

I've built my career on relationships. What's changed isn't the foundation, it's who's in the room. There's a new gatekeeper, and it runs on the same currency as always: credibility.

The brands that win aren't going to be the ones who figure out some AI shortcut. They're going to be the ones who kept investing in real authority: placement by placement, relationship by relationship, story by story.

That's still the job. And right now, it matters more than ever.

Interested in how your brand appears in AI-generated answers, and what to do about it? Let's talk. Email us at ciofficommunications@gmail.com.