Each week we’ll gather headlines and tips to keep you current with how generative AI affects PR and the world at large. If you have ideas on how to improve the newsletter, let us know!
What You Should Know
How Good Communications Influence AI Search Results
Many brands are just starting to experiment with strategies around AI search, a force that’s beginning to reshape how businesses are found, vetted, and trusted. According to a McKinsey survey, AI-powered search is already the most preferred source of information at 44%, edging out traditional search engines at 31%.
Buyers are showing up to websites ready to purchase because tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT have already done much of their homework for them. Instead of visiting multiple vendor sites, prospects get condensed comparisons and recommendations within a single AI conversation. By the time they reach your website, they’ve already formed an opinion — and you may not even know what information shaped it.
This shift compresses the sales funnel. Awareness and consideration now happen upstream, inside AI-generated summaries that favor relevant and authoritative sources.
Good communications practices can influence those sources and the answers AI models are giving your prospects. Start here:
1. Learn the authoritative sources for your space. The mix usually includes third-party content, media, directories, and a variety of other sites, but which ones will change from space to space. That’s why you need to run your own data and see for yourself which sources are influencing the answers. (Sign up here for a free audit to see which sources are most influential for you.)
2. Balance PR and content creation. Creating your own content that expresses your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (Google’s E-E-A-T model) is essential, but you also need to make your brand more visible across many sites. Often, the most recommended brands in AI search make up a small portion of the citations. Some brands whose websites are highly cited are rarely recommended. You need to go beyond your own content, improve media coverage in relevant outlets, and build a brand that’s part of the conversation.
3. Focus on trust. The same characteristics that make a page trustworthy to a human reader are what make it quotable to AI: expert quotes and testimonials; pages rich with facts and evidence; clear, concise, and descriptive writing; consistency in your message.
4. Build consensus. Send signals across earned, owned, and social media, keeping facts consistent across every channel. Make sure your experts are visible where AI systems already look for validation, like in media coverage, on LinkedIn, and within the sources most influential in your industry.
As you think about how to adjust your communications strategy for AI search, keep in mind how the funnel has condensed. If prospects are treating AI like a confidant, what is it telling them about your brand, and how can you influence its recommendations? Discovery depends on relevance, credibility, and consistency.
Elsewhere …
- LISTEN: AI Makes Your Brain Hurt and That’s Exactly the Point
- OpenAI Launches New Web Browser for Macs
- Startup to Use AI to Assess Disease Risk in Embryos
- An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now
- OpenAI Strengthens Sora 2 Guardrails after Actor Bryan Cranston Raises Alarm
- Napster — Yes, That Napster — Is Making a Big AI Play
- Get Ready for AI on the TV
Why you (still) need a prompt library
What’s happening: In the early days of ChatGPT, structured chain-of-thought prompts were essential to getting good outputs. Many users were building “prompt libraries,” repositories for all the commands they had good results with, so they could share them with others. While the models have improved consistently and prompts don’t need to be as structured, you should still keep a library, even if it’s just for yourself.
Why: We’ve all found our own shortcuts for our own workflows, and while you probably don’t need to document one-liner prompts that you remember off the top of your head (like “DO NOT DRAFT ANYTHING UNTIL I SAY SO” so the AI tool doesn’t get too ahead of itself), you might want to keep some of your more nuanced commands handy. You may have created a GPT or a Project for some of your more repetitive work, but those aren’t always best for every case or user.
Like what? Think about what you’re tasked with most often, and what instructions you find yourself repeating or looking for in past chats as you work. Keeping them all in one place makes for easy access, plus you can tweak them depending on how the AI models evolve.
How to get started: The best way to stay organized is with a text document that has a table of contents and anchor links to the prompts, so you can quickly find what you’re looking for. Here is a document to get you started with four prompts you might find helpful. Feel free to make a copy and use it as your own.
Quote of the Week
“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on media search and discovery. Search on TV has always been a bit challenging.”
— Dan Glassman, Senior Director at Samsung, to Axios about a partnership with Perplexity that will bring AI to TVs
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