If AI is asking, is your brand the answer?

One of the biggest challenges in PR is measuring return on investment. Metrics like advertising value equivalent (AVE) and readership reach have long since put ambiguous numbers on the value of earned media.

But the way consumers and professionals discover, research and make decisions about brands is changing, and AI is creating a new opportunity to demonstrate the tangible value of PR.

AI and large language model (LLM) powered tools are increasingly being used - with usage predicted to be double 2024 levels. And, importantly, the information feeding those answers isn’t coming predominantly from brand websites.

In some cases, as much as 96 percent of citations in AI-generated and LLM responses are sourced from editorial content, in favour of a company’s own website. News and media publications are seen as independent, trusted sources and their content is helping shape how AI understands your brand.

Thinking beyond the backlink

In place of ‘traditional’ metrics such as AVE, there’s been a long standing focus on securing links through PR - particularly as SEO has become more sophisticated. But journalists are increasingly savvy to backlink building strategies and affiliate only link programmes now dominate publishing platforms.

However - all is not lost. There’s an opportunity being driven by the increased use in AI tools and LLMs, allowing PR professionals to shift the emphasis away from a link and towards accurate, authoritative and strategic brand mentions on genuine, indexed websites.

Indexed websites and how to maximise them

An indexed website is one that has been discovered and stored by search engines and AI systems, making its content available to be surfaced in search results and used to inform AI-generated responses.

Take regional news titles, respected trade publications and established B2B media, many of the most powerful websites trusted by AI are also some of the oldest on the internet - playing right into the strategy of a press office.

For PR teams with goals to expand AI and LLM references for a brand, this means there’s value in looking beyond the link itself and focusing on securing credible, relevant coverage on the websites that AI is already using to inform its answers.

What’s next?

It’s important for brands to establish an understanding of how you want AI to understand your business and what terminology should be associated with your brand.

Which USPs, products, services or areas of expertise matter most? What is your audience genuinely using AI to find? Prompts should be realistic and give your brand a genuine opportunity to be recognised.

The next step is to benchmark, measure and monitor how your brand appears in response to relevant AI and LLM questions. By establishing a baseline and tracking responses over time, businesses can identify which brands and media sources are being referenced, where visibility is improving and where gaps remain.

This creates a new layer of performance measurement for PR, moving beyond traditional (and sometimes outdated) metrics to demonstrate how earned media is influencing the way AI platforms understand, reference and recommend a brand.

Moving into Q4 and 2027, PR has a bigger role to play than ever. From building the right media profile to measuring how often your brand shows up in the answers that matter, it’s time to power up your PR strategy for the AI era.

Want to know how your brand could be showing up more often in the right places? Get in touch with Lucky North today.