The rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI is rapidly reshaping how people discover, trust, and share information. And that makes news coverage and public relations (PR) the secret weapon for businesses in the AI revolution.
Recent commercial deals between News Corp and Google, designed to feed quality news into Google’s search-based AI, are just the beginning. These deals mean legitimate news coverage will fill LLMs and be used to train AI algorithms so they can answer consumer questions and deliberately exclude paid placements, advertorials, and promotional fluff, writes Kathryn Goater and Anthony Caruana, co-CEOs, Media-Wize.
Unless your business is written about by trusted writers and featured in trusted publications, it simply won’t be visible in AI-generated search results in Australia or globally.
Businesses rely on PR to build reputation, gain credibility and help secure media coverage, but AI is raising the stakes. AI powered search is ushering in a new frontier of discoverability that is driving content recommendations driven by what journalists publish and not what marketers pay for. If your product, service, or thought leadership isn’t newsworthy, AI won’t see you and your business will be invisible to key stakeholders and customers you aim to reach.
This is a profound shift for businesses and marketing teams. In the world of AI, earned media isn’t just valuable; it’s becoming the only media that matters. What LLMs scrape, quote and amplify isn’t your ad spend. It’s well-told, authentically placed stories told by credible journalists.
Any organisation that lowers their PR investment risks being omitted from the LLMs that customers are using to find information and make decisions. Business leaders and marketers, need to work more closely with their PR team, reputable news outlets and trade media to create content that will be favoured by the data scrapers feeding generative AI apps.
Business must focus on gaining authoritative, independent news coverage, features, profiles and opinion pieces to ensure LLMs are populated with information that presents them favourably to generative AI applications. If your PR game is not up to scratch, you will be overtaken by rivals who have worked to consistently tell their stories in respected publications.
The flipside is that if a spokesperson says something they later regret, it can stick around longer, be repurposed and reshared, in new ways that continue to haunt them. Spokesperson training and interview preparation are more important than ever in a world where an LLM can retain and regurgitate an error or perpetuate negative news and a brand crisis.
The value of generative AI and LLMs goes beyond assisting PR teams in accelerating news and content. Being well represented in the outputs of generative AI services will be more important than having a high search rank with Google, Bing or other search tools.
As this revolution takes hold, businesses will need to re-evaluate the value of different parts of their marketing spend and how their effectiveness is measured. New metrics that delve into how different types of content are used and represented in AI tools will need to be developed. When John Wanamaker said, “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” he was working in an era where there were far fewer channels than today. But, as AI becomes embedded in search, within applications and in creative processes it will become increasingly important to ensure PR’s impact on AI is properly recognised and measured.
Businesses that fail to adapt their PR strategy and prepare for this revolution will find themselves like Kodak when digital photography took off, scrambling for relevance, playing catch up and possibly fading into irrelevance.
