As AI platforms become a primary destination for information, PR professionals have an exciting opportunity to enhance how visibility is earned, measured, and sustained. In a recent “PR’s Top Pros Talk…” podcast episode, Doug Simon, CEO of D S Simon Media, and Erik Carlson, President and CEO of Notified, explored what this shift means in practice, and why it may represent one of the most transformative moments the industry has faced. “I'd like to start by finding out how you define the answer engine economy?” Doug asked, setting the stage. Erik didn’t hesitate. “We are at the nexus of one of the biggest generational shifts in how people get information,” he said. “I think it creates this environment where we're trading questions for answers. And that economy is essentially developing within LLMs.”
Erik has seen the same shift reflected in performance metrics. “I was looking at generally what we represent as ROI for our industry, which, if you know traditional PR, is placements and unique views. And I'm looking at the metrics on kind of our global dashboard for different campaigns across our client set, and I'm seeing it drop precipitously, particularly around web traffic, largely because of this concept of zero clicks.” That behavioral change, users getting answers without clicking through, has major implications. “Someone's searching for an answer natively in an answer engine or an LLM, getting the answer, seeing the citation, and not clicking out to the digital property,” Erik said. The adoption curve underscores urgency. “If I go back to 2024, less than 1% of searches were happening natively in LLMs,” Erik noted. “This year, if you look forward to 2026, the most conservative estimates show that 28% of all search traffic will happen natively in answer engines. And by 2030, that number jumps to 80%.” Doug pointed out that the shift is even broader than it appears on the surface. “Some of those numbers don't even count when you search on Google in the traditional way. That's an AI answer that you're getting.”
For Doug, the concept of AI-Powered Broadcast Media Tours™ emerged from both client demands and market pressures. “We kept hearing you’ve got to be findable through AI search. You have to be discoverable,” he said. “And then the next wave of that was earned media, which is the number one thing that's driving it.” That realization leads back to a principle that has always defined effective communication. “The funny thing is, what's new is old again, because it's always been about, hey, what is the information people want to know? And can you find a way to give it to them?” Erik agreed and emphasized how information is distributed matters more than ever. When people look at the hierarchy of preference within LLMs, most citations are nonpaid. “That in and of itself is a great banner for the PR industry.” Still, visibility requires more than a single placement. “LLMs are essentially consensus engines,” Erik explained. “It’s not enough to land your content in one location or post your content on your own site, which might have good digital authority.”
As organizations adapt, one challenge stands out: how should organizations increase visibility in an AI-driven landscape? Erik’s team approached that question through data. He shared insights from Notified’s data-backed SOAR Content Framework™, which helps organizations optimize content. SOAR stands for structure, originality, authority, and recency. What his team discovered challenges the assumption that brand recognition alone guarantees visibility. Comparing a B2B company’s optimized press release to Costco’s press release, Erik noted: “The number of citations that press release received as a result was three and a half times what Costco received, which is fascinating because not a lot of people were searching for it.” The conclusion was hard to ignore. “We kind of figured out the secret sauce in terms of making content machine-readable.”
For an industry that has navigated multiple waves of change, the stakes feel familiar. “I do think back to when the web was becoming big, and PR had a huge opportunity there and sort of missed out on that a little bit,” Doug reflected. “Now we've got AI.” Erik framed the moment in similar terms. “This is akin to sitting here in 1995 and saying Google is never going to catch on and it doesn't matter,” he said. For PR professionals, the path forward is not about abandoning past practices but rethinking their application in a new environment. “Wipe the slate clean and take advantage of what is essentially a re-rack and stack of the order of operations and brand visibility for the next two, three, four, and five years,” Erik said. “The brands that take advantage of that are going to be the brands that win over the next decade.”
View all of the interviews in the “PR's Top Pros Talk” series. Interested in taking part? Contact Doug Simon at [email protected].
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Josh Moed is a Marketing Specialist at D S Simon Media, a leading firm specializing in satellite media tours.
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