The numbers don't lie. ChatGPT is now the fourth or fifth most visited website in the world. Users are spending an average of 16 minutes a day on it. And in January 2026, AI search prompts were up 2.5x compared to the same month the year before. AI isn't coming; it's here, it's mainstream, and it is fundamentally changing the way people find, discover, and make decisions about brands. 

For communications and PR professionals, this is a clear moment to evolve. 

For too long, PR, SEO, social media, and web teams have operated in parallel rather than together. At Palm we have been campaigning to change this for years. Different budget lines, different reporting structures, different KPIs. That model is now a genuine liability. 

Effective online visibility in today's search landscape requires every function to talk to each other and to act as one. PR generates coverage that feeds SEO. SEO data informs what stories are worth telling. Social signals amplify reach and support AI training signals. Your web team ensures the technical infrastructure is in place to make all of it count. These aren't separate strategies anymore. They're a single ecosystem. 

The brands that win in AI-driven search will be the ones that treat communications holistically, with a joined-up strategy that connects every touchpoint. 

One of the most useful reframes at Cision's GEO breakfast was this: think about AI the same way you think about media influence. 

When a journalist covers your brand, that coverage shapes perception. It creates a narrative that others pick up, reference, and build on. AI works in exactly the same way it reads, synthesises, and reflects the information landscape around your brand. If that landscape is rich, authoritative, and consistent, AI will position your brand accordingly. If it's thin, fragmented, or outdated, AI will reflect that too. 

The implication is significant. Just as you'd invest in building relationships with the right media, you need to invest in building the right environment for AI to learn from. 

There's a temptation to measure AI visibility solely by whether your brand is being cited. But visible citations are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath them sits something far more significant: underlying narratives, latent knowledge and the training data that shapes how AI understands your brand in the first place. 

This is why long-term brand messaging arguably matters more than ever. Weaving consistent positioning into every press release, every interview, every piece of thought leadership creates a cumulative effect, a body of evidence that AI can draw on. And crucially, AI will still consider older content. Some citations being surfaced today are from content up to five years old. If your messaging from two years ago is inconsistent with where your brand stands today, it's worth auditing and updating it. 

Understanding how different AI platforms behave will help you shape the right strategy. ChatGPT tends to lean towards major brand coverage and large editorial outlets for its citations. Gemini digs deeper, surfacing specialist and trade media, and it also draws from YouTube, making video content an increasingly important part of the visibility mix. 

It's also worth checking the robots.txt file of key publications. This will tell you whether they allow AI to crawl their content. If a publication your brand is frequently featured in has blocked AI crawlers, that coverage may not be feeding the models as effectively as other publications, a useful piece of intelligence when prioritising media targets. PR Newswire, for context, is currently the 12th most cited source globally across AI platforms. Distribution still matters. 

Google's AI Overviews are now appearing in 16 to 21 percent of search results. The data behind this tells an important story for comms strategy. 

58% of AI overview results are triggered by question-based queries, which means the content most likely to be surfaced is content that directly answers real audience questions. Brands that consistently produce expert commentary and owned content structured around the questions their audiences are actually asking will have a natural advantage. 

Non-branded queries account for 24% of AI overview appearances compared to 13% for branded. Like SEO, it's important to measure AI impact across both branded and non-branded terms. The opportunity to be discovered by audiences who aren't yet looking for you specifically is significant and underutilised by most communications strategies. 

Meanwhile, only 6% of news-related queries will trigger an AI overview. This doesn't mean news-driven PR is less valuable – far from it. But it does reinforce the importance of a broader content strategy that extends beyond reactive media relations. 

Despite what some industry commentators predicted, Google searches have actually increased even as AI search has grown. The two are not in competition they coexist, and increasingly, they reinforce each other. 

This is the clearest possible signal that a holistic approach is the right one. AI visibility and traditional search visibility are not separate goals. The same investment in authoritative coverage, expert-led content, and consistent brand messaging serves both. A well-placed feature in a relevant publication doesn't just earn a click, it feeds search, it feeds AI, and it builds the brand narrative over time. 

Gartner research suggests that PR and communications budgets will double by 2027 in response to increased consumer reliance on AI. The investment is coming. The question is whether it will be spent with a clear, integrated strategy or parcelled out across disconnected functions that continue to work in isolation. 

The brands that understand that AI visibility is a communications challenge as much as a technical one, that long-term brand narrative is the asset that compounds over time, and that PR, SEO, social and digital must operate as one team, will be best positioned when the rest of the market catches up. 

AI hasn't replaced the fundamentals of great communications. It has amplified their importance. Credibility, consistency, authority, and a clear brand voice have always mattered. Now they matter in ways that are measurable, trainable, and directly tied to how your brand is discovered, understood, and trusted at scale. 

Stop siloing. Start thinking holistically. The era of AI rewards the brands that get this right. 

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