Your company could be disappearing from your customers’ Buyer’s Journey without you even realizing. You may be doing everything right: SEO, paid campaigns, analyst relations and media outreach, and still not showing up to your target audiences. Why? AI is increasingly answering questions before prospects and customers ever visit your website.
Analyst firm Gartner says this is triggering a shift in both PR activities and investments, and budgets could double by 2027 as a result. “As organizations adapt to new audience search behaviors, public relations (PR) and earned media budgets must increase to ensure optimal AI search visibility. Reallocating paid budgets to PR and earned media is likely a logical option for most organizations, but it will require investment trade-offs, as well as a clear perspective on measurement and the intended impact on audience .”
Gartner has expanded its coverage of this space in recent years – AI and marketing in particular!
Why Visibility is Changing
The shift is already happening:
- 60% of searches end at AI-generated summaries
- 89% of buyers use AI-powered searches at every stage of the journey
- Google recently detailed how it’s using AI to evolve its search.
Buyer search methods are evolving, too. Platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot deliver context by synthesizing information from multiple sources rather than simply presenting a list of links.
If your brand isn’t cited, how will potential buyers find you? PR has always shaped brand awareness, credibility, and trust through third-party validation. Now your company must be consistently discoverable and citable within AI-generated answers, to ensure you capture buyers’ attention when they are ready. Before they arrive at your website to download content or speak to your sales team, AI chatbots could dismiss you.
In addition to B2B marketing activities, you now need to consider B2AI PR and marketing to ensure your content is both discovered and cited by AI agents. Interviews, Thought leadership, earned media, and analyst reports can influence how AI agents surface your brands. Not all media coverage carries equal weight, so which sources matter most?
AI large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of publicly available content, favoring authoritative, widely cited sources. B2AI marketing means identifying the AI agent influencers and shifting PR activities accordingly. Gartner makes some recommendations. So, how will this change PR and marketing activities?
Earned Media Matters
Gartner recommends using PR and earned media budgets to drive the editorial coverage necessary for visibility in the new search reality. Paid, owned, and social media continue to play a role in your marketing mix. However, buyer behavior is shifting as more .
Last year, a Muck Rack survey found that more than 95% of AI citations come from unpaid media coverage, with 85% of those from earned media sources. Additionally, half of the total AI responses include at least one earned media citation.
It’s not just AI agents that favor reputable sources. Another 2025 study from PR Week found that nearly four in five marketing leaders (78%) say earned media is more effective than traditional advertising.
Adapting PR Activities
Reassess Media Outreach: Gartner recommends auditing the most commonly used AI answer engines among your target stakeholder groups and benchmarking the sources to the answers they cite. Identify and ask the same questions would on AI chatbots. Find out which brands surface most often, as well as the most consistent data sources associated with your messages and topics. Build relationships with influential sources – or hire an agency that already has the relationships with those media!
Strengthen Your Content Strategy: If AI agents and chatbots are already citing your brand, how clear are summaries? Do they consistently reflect your messaging? Do they differentiate your brand? AI agents gather and synthesize data from multiple channels to form a single narrative, and they don’t read nuances well, making message clarity and consistency even more vital upfront to avoid confusion. Gartner recommends establishing new measurement and benchmarking protocols for tracking the progress of increased earned media coverage on AEO. Include competitive and industry tracking to inform strategy and positioning efforts.
If your brand voice is unclear or inconsistent in AI citations, sharpen your baseline positioning and messaging. Make sure that all spokespeople and content creators understand and use that same messaging for press releases, interviews, speeches, social media posts, websites, thought leadership, and sales presentations and collateral.
While 60% of searches may be satisfied by the AI summary, those who do click through can remain on your site longer. Adobe found that once consumers clicked through to a retail site from an AI-generated search, they stayed longer, showing 8% higher engagement.
Well-organized, concise factual statements and evidence-based content (think analyst profiles, case studies, and customer-specific metrics) are what’s required for AI systems to extract, summarize, and cite data. So, while Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still important, to address B2AI, you must also employ Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine optimization (AEO) techniques.
Move Faster: In the AI era, reactions must be much quicker. Gartner recommends building a responsive and proactive earned media function that meets the recency demands of AI search engines.
Increase your response times and the cadence of brand mentions. AI agents prioritize fresh content, which means companies need pre-approved commentary and to identify and react more rapidly to opportunities. When nearly half of AI citations come from news sources, brands can’t rely on occasional media coverage wins. There should be an ongoing stream of timely news, article placements, and thought leadership to remain visible in the sources AI platforms cite most often.
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Measure AI Visibility: Traditional PR metrics focused on traffic, impressions and share of voice. By querying AI agents directly and benchmarking your citations against your competitors, you can measure your share of AI voice, which sources are cited, and how accurately your messaging is represented, to pivot more rapidly. We can help you with this.
PR & Marketing: So, What’s Really Changed?
Today, to address B2AI, PR activities shouldn’t focus solely on media coverage, but on how that coverage performs in AI environments. Many of these tactics should already be established best practices, including building strong relationships with media contacts, analysts, event producers and other influencers and using feedback to sharpen messaging. While earned media is proving to be the trusted source for AI agent citations, marketing professionals have long valued media coverage within the marketing mix. You should now also monitor those AI citations, targeting new media opportunities and creating rapid response commentary.
Gartner says: As organizations adapt to new audience search behaviors, PR and earned media budgets must increase to ensure optimal AI search visibility. Reallocating paid budgets to PR and earned media is likely a logical option for most organizations, but it will require investment trade-offs, as well as a clear perspective on measurement and the intended impact on audience behaviors.”
AI agents are powerful tools that can help you with B2AI PR and marketing activities but be wary of relying on them for everything. Journalists and analysts, for example, are inundated daily with generic AI pitches, so make sure yours stands out for the right reasons.
For many organizations, keeping pace with AI-driven PR shifts is challenging. Agencies with experienced teams can help brands adapt faster. Make sure your agency has established media relationships, AI monitoring and reporting capabilities and strategic expertise in relevant markets.
While some in the industry are concerned about the impacts of AI, it should be used as a tool to strengthen, not replace, established capabilities. AI can help junior talent at PR agencies get up to speed faster on tasks, such as measuring AI share of voice. However, only by leveraging senior PR professionals, their strategic insights, expertise, and relationships built over time, can we nurture the next generation of PR talent to avoid a future skills gap, while also driving measurable results and long-term ROI for companies.
Contact us to discover how we can help you navigate the shift to AI-driven PR and maintain visibility with your target buyers.