Rethinking Visibility in the AI Era

Gerard LaFond

For as long as public relations agencies have been in business, we’ve helped brands, executives and products raise their profiles and protect their reputations. We’ve always been an important “top of the funnel” strategy that helps audiences become aware of your brand. Today, we know PR supports and fortifies other parts of the traditional marketing funnel, like consideration and discovery.

Stepping back, discovery has dictated how brands meet audiences for decades. The informal approach of distributing posters gave way to the Yellow Pages in the 1880s. As the digital age emerged, Google rewrote the rules of visibility and what it meant to be “discovered.”

AI just changed everything about how brands are discovered. We’re entering the next chapter: discovery through Generative AI. Before jumping into the AI era, it’s useful to share some historical context.

The Hoffman Agency was early to the SEO game. Back in 2010, reports surfaced in the U.S. about unintended acceleration in cars from Toyota. This “sticky pedal” issue caused a massive crisis for Toyota, forcing it to recall around 2.3 million cars in the U.S. At the time, Hoffman conducted an experiment, hiring a freelance HTML coder to create a website that combined our POV on the crisis with stories already in the public domain. From there, they tuned the on-page SEO levers, like the title tag, to see if the site would show up when people searched the Toyota crisis.

The results were mind-blowing. Within a couple of weeks, Google searches on the issue consistently turned up our humble site on page one, typically above mainstream media like The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. Hoffman was sold. PR’s content chops were a perfect match for SEO.

In the Google era, discovery hinged on short, blunt keywords: “Toyota PR crisis,” “best rugged laptop” and “PR agency London.” The task for brands was straightforward: Make sure your site was optimized, ranked and listed on page one. Visibility was transactional; show up in the index and you had a shot at the click. PR’s role in this became intertwined with how search engines served results with high domain authority (reputable media/sites) and backlinks from an article or content on a blog, often increasing the chances your brand was discovered via search.

Generative AI changes that equation. Instead of keyword stubs, people now ask fuller, context-rich questions:

• “What caused Toyota to recall a bunch of cars?”
• “Which rugged laptop holds up best for field engineers working in oil and gas?”
• “What’s the most effective way to measure brand visibility in AI-driven discovery?”

These aren’t abstract examples. They’re exactly the type of prompts people are using or “searching” for in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity. Already, 58 percent of consumers now use AI for product or service recommendations—including evaluating vendors—twice as many as in 2023. Analysts forecast that by 2026, one in four searches will flow through AI chatbots.

That’s why traffic from Large Language Models is typically of higher value. The questions are richer. The context is deeper. And the intent is clearer. Someone typing “best laptop” into Google might be browsing. Someone asking, “Which brand of drones is most trusted by oilfield engineers?” is probably much closer to a purchase.

That’s where PR comes in. These richer queries lean heavily on trusted third-party sources like press coverage, analyst reports, expert commentary and industry reviews. In other words, the very currency of PR. As the playing field shifts, the levers we’ve always pulled to build credibility are becoming even more critical in shaping what AI engines surface. This isn’t just a channel shift. It’s a new playing field tailor-made for PR to play a bigger role.

For PR, credibility has always been the game. What has changed now is how these signals get used. The influence of earned mentions and trusted third-party validation is no longer limited to people; they also feed the LLMs. The signals that sway journalists and decision-makers are now the raw material for training generative engines. In other words, the same building blocks of reputation now double as inputs that teach AI what to surface and trust.

Here’s what you need to know: Your audience is now using AI to discover brands. Earned media can and will sway the LLMs to display your brand or perhaps your competitors. Search and discoverability have evolved overnight. Do you know how your brand shows up through GenAI? Is the right information showing up in AI searches? Is your brand showing up at all?

Every media measurement or SEO tool is rolling out a service offering to try and measure how brands show up via GenAI. Similar to creating a Share Of Voice methodology, PR agencies and in-house teams will need to figure out how to scientifically quantify “discoverability” in generative AI tools. Do you depend on a third-party tool vendor? Do you invent the capability? While we launched GEDI (Generative Engine Discovery Insights) earlier this year, there is no right or wrong answer to the question. The real question is what’s next?

Discoverability via AI will become a new PR KPI. This is a new era for measuring success in communications. This is no longer about impressions, but the value of earned media attention based on quality publications and their influence on LLMs. The brands that commit to quality content development, consistent thought leadership and earned media will win the discoverability race, and PR teams will need to keep score.

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Gerard LaFond is The Hoffman Agency’s Managing Director for North America.