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Welcome, everyone, to the CONQR AI Search Podcast. This is your guide to really navigating the, well, the whole AI-driven search landscape. We're brought to you by the AI Monitor Team.

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I'm Katherine. And I'm Avi. It's great to be back.

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Our mission here, it's pretty simple, really. We want to help you boost your visibility in AI searches, and we'll give you simple, actionable steps, things you can actually do without spending a single penny. And well, we can brag just a tiny bit.

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We were recently honored by Yes Users. Oh, yeah. Number one consultants for generative engine optimization.

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That was after their big survey with hundreds of SaaS companies. That felt good. It really did.

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It's, you know, it's proof these strategies work. Absolutely. And this is a really special series for us.

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It's part of an 11-episode deep dive. We're detailing the top 11 most effective generative engine optimization techniques. Think of it like your practical roadmap.

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Yeah, exactly. And we've already covered some really game-changing stuff in the first four. We have.

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First up was implementing that LLMs.txt file, basically, you know, telling AI crawlers how to play nice with your site. Right. The AIrobots.txt. Then we looked at Reddit, how participating there builds authority.

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Really important. Yep. Third, we talked about using authoritative citations strategically, getting those mentions in the right places.

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Crucial. And just last time we discussed evolving your sort of traditional SEO playbook for this new world of generative engine optimization, or answer engine optimization, as some call it. Okay, so what's next on the list? We're on number five.

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Number five. Today we're tackling why public relations PR is absolutely critical now in the age of AI search. Yeah, this one's big.

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You might think, oh, PR, that's just press releases. Right. Okay.

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But as we're about to see, it's changing massively. And it might just hold the key to your brand's future visibility. It really might.

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Okay, let's unpack this one. All right. So the fundamental thing to grasp is how people find information online.

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It's just radically changing. Right. Those traditional blue links on Google, they're still there, but they're being displaced more and more.

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How so? What's displacing them? Well, a few things. Think about AI-generated summaries first. Like Google's AI overviews.

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Yeah, they're everywhere now. Billions of searches per day are showing those now. Billions.

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And it's not just Google summaries, is it? What about the chatbots, the conversational interfaces? Exactly. Tools like ChatGT, Claude, they're offering direct answers. You don't even need to click? Pretty much.

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You ask a question, you get an answer right there. ChatGT alone, get this, reached like 400 million weekly active users back in February 2025. 400 million weekly.

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Wow. That's a huge audience getting info without visiting websites. It's massive.

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And then you've also got these standalone AI search platforms popping up. Perplexity AI, Bing Copilot. Right.

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More fragmentation, which leads to this zero-click thing I keep hearing about. Yes. Okay, this is where it gets really interesting.

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SparkToro did a study recently, found that zero-click searches, they now account for something like 60% of all Google searches. 60%. So most people aren't clicking through.

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A huge chunk aren't. Yeah. They get their answer directly from the search results page, the SRP.

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They see the AI overview or the featured snippet, get what they need, and boom, done. Okay, so if clicks aren't the main goal, or at least not the only goal, what signals does AI search care about then? What's the new currency? That is the million-dollar question, isn't it? And the answer is, well, it's different. Traditional SEO stuff like backlinks, content relevance, still matters, don't get me wrong, but AI seems to primarily focus on other things, entities like specific brands, people, concepts, and also reputation and authority signals.

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But it gathers these signals from all over the web, not just links. So it's a little broader. Much broader.

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It fundamentally changes how info gets surfaced, how it gets cited, how it's prioritized. It's less about just a link graph, maybe more like a trust graph, you know? A trust graph. I like that.

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And I've seen some, well, some pretty eye-opening research about what correlates with visibility in these AI systems, what's driving that trust. You're probably thinking about the studies on brand mentions. And yeah, they are eye-opening.

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Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found that branded web mentions, just mentions of the brand name, had the strongest correlation with visibility in AI overviews. Is it stronger than backlinks? Significantly stronger. Brands with the most web mentions, they showed up in like up to 10 times more AI overviews.

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10 times. That really does flip traditional SEO on its head. It absolutely does.

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And it wasn't just Ahrefs. Sierra Interactive did a study too, what drives brand mentions in AI answers. Same conclusion, basically.

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They found the direct impact of backlinks on brand visibility in LLMs, large language models, was weak or even neutral. Weak or neutral. Wow.

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So links aren't the golden ticket anymore. Not in the same way, it seems. Rand Fishkin, you know, founder of Moz.

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Sure. He said it back in October 2024. He put it really well.

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He said, the currency of Google search was links. The way that you rank in large language models is not that. The currency of large language models is mentions.

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Specifically, he said, words that appear frequently near other words across the training data. Training data. What exactly does that encompass? Where is the AI learning from? Good question.

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So training data is basically this enormous collection of publicly available text that the LLMs ingest. Like what? Everything. Webpages, blogs, news sites, forums, you name it.

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Wikipedia, ebooks, academic papers, even public social media posts. So Twitter, Facebook. If it's public, yeah.

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Q&A sites like Reddit and Quora are huge. Product descriptions, reviews, it's vast. So the more often your brand is mentioned in relevant, high quality places within that data.

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The more likely the AI is to see it and use it. Exactly. The more likely it is to be included when the AI generates an answer related to what you do.

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So, okay, let me see if I've got this straight. Basically, it's as simple as this. If you want your brand to show up consistently in AI tools and LLM responses, just putting good content on your own site, that's not enough anymore.

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Not nearly enough. Your brand needs to be talked about accurately, contextually, authoritatively, in the right places, by the right voices, all across the web. Is that the new reality? That's pretty much the core of it, yeah.

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It's less about building a static structure of links and more like cultivating an ecosystem, a thriving web of credible mentions around your brand. An ecosystem of mentions. The AI isn't just counting links.

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It's looking at the whole picture, the patterns, the context, the frequency of your brand showing up credibly. Which brings us directly to PR. How does digital PR fit into creating this ecosystem? Well, this is exactly why digital PR suddenly becomes not just, you know, nice to have, but absolutely essential.

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It's probably one of the most effective ways to secure those authoritative brand mentions. The kind that appear on high-quality, trustworthy sources. The kind of sources AI models are trained on? Precisely.

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Those are the sources they learn from and draw from when they build their answers. PR is about getting those high-value mentions. So landing some expert commentary in a major news outlet or maybe contributing to an industry roundup or even just getting covered on a really relevant niche blog.

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All of that, yes. Digital PR puts your brand in those important places. It helps build that rich web of brand mentions you talked about.

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Exactly. A web that the AI models are likely to crawl, learn from, and then hopefully cite. So it feels like PR's value proposition just got a massive upgrade, right? I think so, yeah.

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For years, PR folks have been saying, hey, brand mentions help visibility and authority. Now with AI in the mix, we can say it with way more confidence, that high-quality feature in a top publication, even if it doesn't have a backlink, if it has strong contextual mentions of your brand, that's a huge win now. Maybe even bigger than a link in some cases.

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Because those mentions directly teach the LLM about you. Exactly. They help the AI understand who you are, what you do, why you're credible, what topics you're associated with.

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And getting surfaced in those AI overviews, which sit right at the top of search results, that's like earned visibility gold. It's earned visibility at massive scale. And think about it.

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PR's core job is to position your brand as a credible expert, right? A go-to solution. So when an AI tool actually selects your brand to help answer a user's query, that's an incredibly powerful signal. It reinforces the very authority and trustworthiness that PR aims to build.

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OK, that makes perfect sense. But it can't all be positive, can it? What are the potential downsides of relying on LLM visibility? You're right. It's definitely a double-edged sword.

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Let's talk upsides first, though. OK. The big one is massive reach.

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Your brand gets seen by tons of users interacting with these AI summaries. Right. Exposure.

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Then there's perceived authority. Being mentioned by an AI, it carries this sort of implicit endorsement. Users tend to assume the AI is surfacing reliable stuff.

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Sure. Consistent exposure builds brand awareness, top-of-mind recall, even if they don't click right then. OK.

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But the downside. It seems like the big one is clicks, right? The thing traditional SEO always measured. That's the major challenge.

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Yeah. If the AI answers the question well enough right there in the overview... Why would they click through to your site? Exactly. They might not need to.

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Which leads straight to attribution challenges. How so? Well, these AI responses often blend info from multiple sources. And they don't always cite them clearly or consistently.

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So it becomes really hard to track when your brand was mentioned or measure the direct impact, like a click or a conversion from that mention. And you mentioned inconsistency. Yeah.

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AI responses can vary depending on the specific model, how the user phrases the query, even the time of day sometimes. So your visibility might fluctuate. OK.

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So less direct traffic, hard to track. What does the data show? Well, we're seeing it already. Since AI overviews really rolled out, a lot of search marketers are reporting that impressions in Search Console are kind of creeping up.

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OK. So people are seeing the results. Clicks are flat.

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Or even falling. It's a pretty clear sign users are getting info directly from the AI, which, you know, if you're only measuring clicks, that's frustrating. Your old KPIs, key performance indicators, might look bad.

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It really does feel like we're stepping back in time a bit, doesn't it? To like old school PR before everything was digitally trackable. It kind of does. You get that great magazine feature.

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You knew it was valuable, but you couldn't track exactly who read it or what they did next. Precisely. And now we're sort of back there, but in this new AI context.

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We don't always have reliable ways to measure every AI mentions direct impact. But the impact is still happening. We believe so, yes.

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Which means our attribution models, the ones relying purely on direct clicks, they're becoming outdated fast. Yeah. So we need to shift focus.

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Definitely. We need to measure things like brand awareness, sentiment, recall more broadly, understand that indirect impact. Like someone sees your brand in an AI answer, doesn't click them, but maybe they search for you later or convert through a different channel.

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Exactly that. That indirect path is becoming much more significant. So what should brands be tracking then? What are the new metrics? Well, smart brands are looking at a basket of things, growth in search volume for their brand name and key product terms.

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Okay. Makes sense. They're looking for uplift in direct website traffic, especially after big PR pushes or coverage.

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Correlating activity. Yeah. And using social listening tools, brand sentiment analysis, looking for spikes in visibility or positive mentions that might line up with AI features.

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So it's about reading between the lines a bit more. Pretty much. Understanding that influence and visibility don't always come with a neat little tracking link attached.

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LLM visibility. It's often about long-term brand building, reputation, not just those immediate clicks. Okay.

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So given this whole new landscape, it sounds like, well, SEO teams and PR teams really need to talk to each other now. Oh, absolutely. They can't operate in silos anymore.

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They have to align on target topics, audiences, messaging. It's crucial. So collaboration is step one.

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What else? What are the practical steps for brands wanting to leverage PR for AI visibility? Strategically, you need to prioritize getting high-quality mentions from authoritative sources. Media outlets, key influencers in your space. Quality over quantity.

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Definitely. And build strong topical authority. Consistently get coverage around the core subjects you want your brand to own in AI results.

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That consistency helps the AI make the connection. What about the actual content of the PR? Does that need to change? Yeah. Think about being quotable.

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Craft unique insights, maybe some original data points, provocative quotes. Stuff that journalists and bloggers actually want to pick up and cite. Make it easy for them to mention you.

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Exactly. Right. So we've laid out how PR can really boost visibility in AI search.

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But it's not just about using AI, is it? AI itself is changing the PR game, sometimes in challenging ways. Oh, absolutely. There's definitely another side to the rise of generative AI.

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While amazing for drafting things quickly, it doesn't replace human creativity, right? And we're seeing this flood of content that's, well, kind of similar. Lifeless, even. AI-generated content can be pretty bland.

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It can be. And if it's not edited well by a human, it can feel generic, maybe even erode trust because people start questioning if it's authentic or accurate. It's a quality control issue.

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And it causes confusion, too, right? I heard about an experiment where people couldn't reliably tell original human writing from AI text. Yeah, that highlights the practical confusion. And we're seeing clients now starting to ask for proof that AI wasn't used or wasn't the primary author in PR work.

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Really? Demanding proof? And PR pros themselves. They need to be careful. They have to verify the originality of materials they get from clients before bitching them to protect their own relationships with the media.

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So transparency and verification are becoming huge. Huge. Which leads to the ethical side.

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With generative AI being so pervasive, it's really crucial that PR agencies, individual pros, everyone, develops a clear ethics code around AI use. What would that involve? Things like being transparent about AI's role, respecting privacy, ensuring data used to train or prompt AI is handled responsibly. It's about maintaining trust, basically.

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That's the bottom line, like that quote you mentioned earlier. In the end, ethical AI use is about maintaining trust because once that's gone, no tool can bring it back. That really sums it up.

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Use AI to enhance the connection. Don't let it undermine the trust that connection relies on. Couldn't have said it better.

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So yeah, we've seen PR is definitely taking a starring role now in the AI search era. From shaping the AI's training data with quality mentions to building that deep reputation that goes beyond just links. PR isn't just supporting anymore.

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It's kind of leading the charge for visibility. Okay, so here's a final thought to leave everyone with. We know AI systems are, as you said, hungry for high-quality, context-rich signals from human content.

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Right. And we know PR is vital for creating and placing that high-quality content. So what's our collective responsibility here? What's our responsibility in making sure the information AI learns from the information PR helps generate and disseminate is actually true? That it has integrity? That's a big question.

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It feels like it goes beyond just marketing or visibility. It's about the future of information and communication itself, isn't it? Something for all of us, especially brands, to really think about. Definitely something to mull over.

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And that's a wrap on today's episode of the Conquer AI Search with AI podcast. We just dove deep into why PR is a game changer in the age of AI search and how you can master it like a pro. But hey, this conversation doesn't stop here.

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If you've got thoughts, questions, or something to add that we missed, drop a comment below. Your take could spark the next big discussion and help fellow listeners, and yeah, us too, level up. Ready to take action? Head over to AI Monitor's website.

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We've got tools and geo-specific services to help B2B SaaS companies like yours boost AI visibility and get discovered where it counts. Loved this episode? Hit that follow or subscribe button on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you're listening. And if we brought you value, leave us a rating or review.

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It seriously helps us reach more awesome people like you. Join us next Saturday, where we'll break down the sixth generative engine optimization technique to keep you ahead of the curve. Stay sharp.

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We're here to help you dominate AI search. Until then, keep innovating, and we'll catch you in the next one.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)