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| Nikki Festa O'Brien |
In years past, brands measured online success by clicks, followers or having a top ranking on Google—with SEO defining the playbook.
However, as GenAI, led by language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, transforms how information is found and trusted, a new set of metrics is rapidly emerging. The battle for brand visibility, authority and influence is now fought within algorithms—and we’re left to wade through various tools to pick up the pieces and solve a new puzzle.
The question facing our industry today is: If a consumer, enterprise buyer or journalist asks AI about your company, will the return be in your favor? Will it summarize your value, highlight your reputation, and distinguish you from competitors? Or will your brand be lost in a sea of bland generics, or worse, misrepresented by outdated chatter scraped from the web?
Introducing the newest metric that matters
Welcome to the era of Share of Model (SoM), the emerging gold standard for measuring how well a brand is represented and perceived inside today’s dominant language models. It’s a shift driven less by trend and more by tectonic changes in how discovery works. This is because AI now sits at the front door of consumer and B2B decision-making.
Data backs up this transformation. A new study from Yext found that 62 percent of consumers now trust AI to guide their brand decisions—putting it on par with traditional search during key decision moments. These days, most users never even visit an original website (a phenomenon known as “the death of the click”). As Tim Sanders, VP of Research Insights at G2, warned, “If your brand doesn’t show up in that LLM-first discovery moment, you’re not even in the conversation.”
Fading web traffic and declining press release clicks are symptoms; declining share of model is the underlying cause. Moreover, AI bot crawls have more than doubled from 20 million crawls a day in January 2025 to 45 million a day in June, Botify shared at CommerceNext.
Share of Model measures much more than mere mention. It evaluates whether generative AIs correctly understand and present a brand’s unique proposition, factual details, and even differentiation within a crowded marketplace. When AI engines present lists of “best CRM systems,” “leading energy innovators,” or “top design agencies,” which brands come to the forefront? Which are described as pioneers, trusted names or distinct authorities? This is the SoM scoreboard, and it’s quickly becoming the conversation at board meetings and investor updates.
Rewriting the rules of digital influence
Traditional digital strategies aren’t adequate in this environment. Press releases and brand websites now function less as destinations and more as critical inputs to AI training data. Recent studies, such as a 2024 peer-reviewed analysis of 500,000 corporate press releases, indicate that approximately 24 percent of the release text is directly cited or adapted in LLM results.
The study also notes that third-party sites, including Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and partnerships with .edu and .gov domains, as well as trusted review aggregators such as G2 or Reddit, have a disproportionate influence. AI models prioritize accuracy, consensus and authority over volume or recency. This has led to practices such as embedding structured summaries and AI-friendly metadata into every piece of digital content, including press releases, partner bios and even product pages.
Just as important, GenAI’s appetite for narrative accuracy turns market reputation from an afterthought into a critical priority. Now, inaccurate, outdated or negative information—no matter how buried—may resurface in an instant. Auditing and updating content across partner portals, directories and influential review sites has become a foundational practice. A single outdated Wikipedia entry or old media quote can skew a brand’s AI profile for millions.
What AI-first branding looks like in action
Those who proactively measure and manage their SoM are seeing the benefits and are able to take the right next steps. Consider the case of a leading energy company that focused on SoM optimization. After updating digital assets, improving third-party content, and providing AI-ready materials, it saw a 20-45% year-over-year improvement in how AI described its products and differentiators compared to competitors. These gains outpaced the decline in web visits and owned social impressions, proving that AI visibility now drives brand perception, even when traditional funnel metrics contract.
The impact extends to earned media strategy. Major publishers, including The Washington Post, which collaborates with OpenAI, and Bloomberg and Yahoo, which are experimenting with instant AI-generated article summaries, now ensure that stories are surfaced not just as search results, but as the very answers within AI interfaces—placement, credibility, and narrative framing matter more than backlinks alone.
For communicators, SoM finally provides a defensible, impact-driven metric that resonates in the C-suite. When presenting to a CEO or chief communications officer, reporting on web sessions alone is insufficient. Now, the question is: Are our messages controlling the narrative presented by AI? Are we among the leaders surfaced in critical moments, such as acquisition, hiring, crisis or launch?
Winning brand relevance with an AI-driven mindset
Beyond tactics, the adoption of SoM signals a shift in mindset for brand building. Web traffic and clicks matter, but in this AI-driven landscape, brands must measure and influence their representation wherever intelligence is synthesized. This means adopting new metrics: embedding AI summaries, investing in authoritative partnerships, enhancing human storytelling, and continually assessing how models perceive the brand.
The winners will be those who recognize that, in the age of generative AI, relevance is conferred not by being loudest or most visible, but by establishing authority, trust, and clarity where digital minds decide which voices matter.
As this frontier evolves, measuring and managing Share of Model will separate the signal from the noise.
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Nikki Festa O’Brien is CEO of Greenough Communications.
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