3 ways PR teams can understand how AI sees their brand
3 ways PR teams can understand how AI sees their brand
Artificial intelligence is changing the way audiences discover and evaluate brands. Today, AI-generated answers often shape first impressions — and traditional monitoring and SEO tools don’t show the full picture. As McKinsey & Company noted in 2025, AI-generated summaries now appear in roughly 50% of Google searches, meaning audiences often decide whether they trust or engage with a company before clicking a link.
As AI increasingly shapes what people see and trust, traditional brand monitoring and SEO only tell part of the story. Brands need a clearer view into how they’re actually being interpreted by large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Some platforms are already helping brands measure AI visibility by tracking mentions, influential sources, and sentiment to show how AI portrays a company in context. These AI-centric insights give PR teams a clear picture of their brand’s presence and influence in generative search.
This analysis from PR Newswire highlights how changes in the search landscape require communications teams to factor brand-level AI visibility intelligence into their campaigns.
From Search Rankings to AI Narratives
As search evolves to include AI-generated summaries, the central questions have shifted from "How do we rank on a search engine?" to "How does our brand appear in AI-generated answers?" and "What is the exact narrative being constructed about us by LLMs?"
Without data-driven insights into these new channels, shaping a brand’s narrative, ensuring its inclusion in relevant results, and enhancing its discoverability becomes a matter of guesswork rather than strategy.
“We must begin with a solid understanding of the foundation and hopefully get a data-driven picture of what our citations on generative AI platforms look like,” Scott Newton, Cision Solutions consultant, said during a recent AI summary-focused webinar. “Ultimately, if we want to enact strategies to improve, we need to make sure that we are working with good data and that we know the benchmark that we’re beginning from.”
3 Actions for Measuring a Brand’s AI Visibility
AI-generated summaries are becoming a standard feature of information discovery. This is creating a new set of challenges for communications and marketing professionals. But while many organizations are acutely aware of AI's big impact — Brandwatch’s The Marketer of 2026 report indicates 81% of marketers consider AI tools essential — most lack the specialized tools to measure or modify how these models perceive their brand.
In fact, Branch’s AI Search and Discovery: Enterprise Benchmark Report found that 80% of businesses struggle to measure the impact of AI search.
The solution is to move past conventional metrics and adopt a framework that is built for answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative optimization (GEO).
This requires a more focused approach to measuring AI visibility centered on three things: presence, sources, and perception.
1. Track Brand Mentions
Start with the baseline: Are you showing up at all?
Measure how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers, your share of voice within those responses, and how that visibility changes across platforms over time. If you’re not consistently present in relevant prompts, nothing else matters — you’re not in the conversation.
2. Identify Influential Sources
AI models synthesize from what they trust rather than guessing.
Understand which publications, URLs, and content are shaping how your brand is described. These are your real levers. Winning in AI search means strengthening your presence across the sources that models rely on — not just creating more content, but the right content in the right places.
3. Analyze AI-Generated Answers
This is where perception becomes clear.
Look at how AI actually describes and positions your brand. The language, context, and comparisons tell you whether your messaging is landing — or getting lost. This is the fastest way to spot gaps between what you’re saying and what AI is saying about you.
Navigating the AI Search Landscape Requires a Data-Driven Approach
In a time where AI often acts as the first point of contact with your brand, PR teams must go beyond SEO. Measuring mentions, understanding influential sources, and analyzing AI-generated answers give you the tools to understand your AI footprint and shape the narrative.
The goal is not only to be discoverable but also to be portrayed accurately and favorably when audiences turn to AI for answers. AI is telling your story. The question is whether you’re measuring and shaping it or not.
This story was produced by PR Newswire and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
