Why PR is now the most important tool in your search strategy
There's a conversation happening across PR and marketing circles right now. The way people search for information has changed, and most businesses haven't caught up.
For years, the goal was to rank on Google. You hired someone to optimise your website, stuffed the right keywords into your blog posts, built backlinks, and hoped you'd land on page one. That game isn't over, but the rules have moved in a way that puts PR (proper, strategic PR) back at the centre of the table.
Here's why.
People aren't Googling the way they used to
When someone wants to know which accounting software suits a mid-sized business, or which IT company has a strong track record in financial services, they're not typing that into Google anymore. They're asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews and getting a single, distilled answer.
According to web analytics firm Similarweb, zero-click searches (where users get their answer directly on the results page without visiting a website) jumped from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. In the same period, AI platforms grew rapidly as referral sources, generating 1.13 billion visits in June 2025 alone, a 357% increase year on year. The numbers are hard to ignore. Search behaviour has changed, and it's changed fast.
When someone asks an AI tool a question about your industry, or your company specifically, the AI doesn't guess. It draws on what it has indexed from reputable, authoritative sources. The question for any business is: are you in those sources?
Google now leads with AI, every single time
It's easy to think of AI search as something that happens in standalone tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, separate from the Google search most people still use by default. Not anymore.
At Google I/O in May 2026, Google confirmed that AI Mode is no longer experimental. It is now the default search experience, powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, and AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of results) now reach more than 2.5 billion users monthly. AI Mode itself has reached 1 billion users. That user base quadrupled between May and November 2025, and then doubled again in the six months that followed.
When someone searches for your company today, they almost certainly see an AI-generated summary before they see any website links. That summary comes from sources Google deems authoritative. If you're not in those sources, you're not in the conversation, even if someone went looking for you specifically.
AI can write. It can't build trust.
I've spoken to PR teams who worry AI will make them redundant. It's easy to see why. AI can draft a press release, summarise a report, and turn around content quickly. But it can't decide how a brand should be perceived, build a relationship with a journalist, or know which story to tell and when. That still takes a person.
The Muck Rack 2026 State of AI in PR report backs this up: 76% of PR professionals are using AI in their work, and 82% say it improves their output. Yet only 12% are using AI agents, and most of those still need human oversight. AI speeds things up. It doesn't replace the thinking.
What has changed is what's at stake. The coverage you secure, the publications you appear in, the expert voices you put forward: all of it now feeds directly into how AI systems understand and represent your brand.
Authority is everything and AI knows the difference
AI doesn't prioritise content because a brand paid to promote it, or because a website is technically well-optimised. It prioritises content that has been independently validated. A 2025 study found that up to 75% of links in Google's AI Overviews come from authoritative news sites, industry publications, and knowledge platforms, specifically sources that already rank in the top 12 organic results.
Research from early 2026 found that earned media accounts for 48% of all brand citations by large language models, and that 90% of AI citations come from earned and owned media, not paid placements. Put simply: if you've been written about in credible publications, you're far more likely to show up in an AI-generated answer.
The flip side is just as striking. Around 80% of URLs cited by AI platforms don't rank in Google's top 100 for the same query. Traditional SEO and AI visibility are two different systems, and a business that has focused only on one may find itself invisible in the other.
Google confirmed this in May 2026 when it published an official optimisation guide for generative AI features in Search. The message was clear: AEO and GEO are not new disciplines. Google calls them "still SEO." The guide also dismissed several tactics being sold as AI essentials, including llms.txt files, content chunking, and special schema markup, and told site owners to ignore them. What counts is original content, a well-structured website, and genuine authority. The last one is PR's territory.
Your own content can only take you so far
Many companies have invested in content marketing: regular blog posts, LinkedIn articles, newsletters. That content has value, but it only goes so far when it comes to AI visibility. AI tools are looking for third-party validation, the digital equivalent of someone else vouching for you.
If you tell a room full of people how good your business is, some might believe you. If a respected journalist or trade publication tells that same room, the credibility transfer is immediate. AI works the same way. Brands with consistent earned media coverage attract significantly more AI citations than those relying on owned content alone.
Volume of coverage is one factor, but where you're covered is just as important. OpenAI has formal content partnerships with outlets including News Corp (the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron's), the Associated Press, and others. Google's AI systems reflect the same quality bias: the sources that AI trusts are, by and large, the sources that journalists have trusted for years.
PR was always doing this. AI just raised the stakes.
There's a tendency in some businesses, in the tech sector especially, to treat PR as a nice-to-have: useful for brand awareness, but secondary to sales activity, events or digital advertising. That thinking is becoming costly.
A good PR consultant does more than place stories. They build the body of published, credible, third-party evidence that AI systems draw on when forming answers. Every profile piece, every expert quote in a trade publication, every well-placed contributed article is now also an input into how AI describes and recommends your business.
Earned media, thought leadership, media relations: these are the same things researchers now call Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). The label is new. The work isn't.
Writing in Search Engine Journal in May 2026, digital PR expert Greg Jarboe made the same point: digital PR hasn't changed, AI search has simply made the fundamentals more important. The format of search answers has changed. The intent behind them hasn't.
More coverage isn't the answer. Better coverage is.
Flooding press release wires with low-quality content, or chasing coverage in any publication that will take a submission, won't move the needle. AI systems are sophisticated enough to weight authority: a mention in a respected technology publication carries far more influence than a post in a low-traffic directory.
The quality of media relations still counts. So does the relevance of the outlet to your audience, and the credibility of the journalist and the platform. Good PR now does more work than it ever did. The article is just the starting point.
Where to focus right now
If your business isn't earning genuine coverage in credible publications, you're becoming invisible to AI tools. That gap will only grow.
A solid PR strategy goes beyond press releases for product launches. Here's where to focus:
Target credible coverage. AI relies on authoritative sources, so placements in recognised, reputable outlets carry far more weight than volume alone.
Maintain steady visibility. One-off announcements aren't enough. Regular coverage ensures your brand appears consistently, to both human readers and AI systems.
Align messaging across channels. Every press release, LinkedIn post, and article should reinforce the same story.
Monitor your AI footprint. Check how your brand appears in AI-generated summaries periodically, and adjust your content strategy if gaps appear.
Use AI as a support tool, not a substitute for strategy. It can help with drafting, summarising, and spotting trends, but the judgement and direction still need to come from a person.
If you're running a technology, professional services, or B2B business in South Africa, this is worth taking seriously. Local credibility is valuable, but so is coverage in internationally indexed publications. A combination of both gives AI systems the breadth of evidence they need to treat your brand as an authority.
The way people find information has changed. How trust is earned hasn't. The machines are paying attention. Make sure they find you.
