Joining the Dots

Written By Rachel O'Connor

Joining the dots. Daffodils poking through a human finger print

There's a lot of new and useful content being published right now by organisations and people, me included, offering to guide you through the forest of AI, visibility and impact. I'm no AI expert, but I'm curious about how brand, business and personal stories show up in AEO, and how, as a marcomms professional, I can guide clients to get maximum impact from their content and communications effort. Three pieces caught my attention earlythis week. Here's my take on each, and what they add up to.

Three pieces, one morning

PR Newswire: The Communications Industry is Asking the Wrong Question About AI Glenn Frates argues that AI systems don't rank pages the way search engines did. They synthesise answers from patterns of trust and attribution across the wider information ecosystem. The brands showing up in AI answers aren't the most technically optimised, they're the ones that have spent years publishing clear data and building consistent ownership of a topic. Takeout: authority compounds, optimisation doesn't. If you've spent two years fiddling with meta descriptions, you've been polishing the wrong doorknob.

State of Brand: the Cannes CMO panel with Google, OpenAI and Chase Google's Lorraine Twohill says search queries now run up to three times longer than they used to. OpenAI's Colin Fleming puts commercial intent at around a fifth of ChatGPT usage. AI Trailblazers founder Shiv Singh offered the line worth pinning above your desk: an organisation's AI capability is only as strong as its least fluent person, whatever their title. Takeout: the gap isn't the technology, it's the human sitting next to it. One dazzling AI champion doesn't help much if the rest of the building is still printing emails.

Hard Numbers: Gullible Engine Optimisation Paul Stollery's team spent two years auditing what chatbots say about brands, and found the platforms strikingly credulous. Nearly nine in ten "top ten provider" listicles cited in fintech were written by one of the providers named, placing themselves first. Three in ten sources shaping crypto custody comparisons came from a company being compared. Seven in ten answers about reasons not to buy from named B2B SaaS brands were shaped by competitor content. Then, to prove the point, the team invented an award, named their own co-founder the best-dressed PR practitioner in the UK on a single page, and asked ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini who holds the title. Half named him, several as settled fact. Takeout: if you're not shaping what the machine says about you, someone with a stake in the answer already is, and it won't know fact from a very well-dressed fabrication.

Why these three belong together

  • PR Newswire says authority compounds.

  • Hard Numbers shows what fills the space when yours doesn't: competitors, self-interested rankings and invention, all laundered into something that reads as neutral fact.

  • SOB Cannes Report - explains why so few organisations have caught this in time, because the fluency gap means nobody is watching closely enough to notice, let alone correct it.

  • The PRCA's Gabriela Weiss Clarke sets the ethical line: comparison content is fine if it discloses who's behind it and treats alternatives fairly. Most content shaping AI answers today doesn't come close.

What this tells us in practice

  • Audit before you publish. Most organisations have no idea what ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity currently say about them, or who's filling the silence where their own voice should be. That's the starting point now, not a nice-to-have for later.

  • Treat authority as infrastructure, not activity. A clear, consistent brand comms strategy that delivers expertise adn athority in your owned spaces will carry you through. A consistency that ensures messaging, authority adn expertise reinforces the topics you want to own will win out.

  • Correct the record deliberately, not defensively. Where an audit turns up bias or fabrication, don't copy the tactic. Publish the truthful, attributed version, and put it where these engines already trust. Strong, consistent earned media does most of the heavy lifting here.

  • Build AI fluency as a comms capability, not an IT rollout. Chase gave one curious employee real tools and freedom to experiment, then built what she learned into a sandbox for fifty more. Curiosity is the skill that matters most, and comms people have always been rather good at that.

  • Raise the floor, not just the ceiling. Singh's warning deserves taking literally, not just nodding along to in a workshop. One brilliant strategist doesn't make a fluent organisation if everyone else is working from outdated assumptions, or none at all.

  • Be honest about measurement. Chase's Carla Hassan admitted she isn't sure the funnel exists in a form that can still be measured cleanly. Reporting frameworks built for a tidy, linear journey will mislead more than they inform from here on.

The short version

None of this is a campaign, tempting as it is to package it as one. It's a discipline:

  • find out what the machines are saying

  • own your topics consistently

  • keep your people curious and properly critical

  • measure honestly while the ground keeps shifting

Treat AI visibility as a checklist and you'll get a short-term bump. Treat it as sustained investment in brand authority, build capability and update and correct misinformation, and you'll be who the machines, and the humans reading their output, keep coming back to.

ends

If any of this has struck a nerve, that's usually the sign it's worth a proper conversation rather than another article. I'm always happy to be a sounding board, whether that's an audit of what's currently being said about your organisation or working through where the fluency gaps sit in your team. Get in touch if that would help.

Sources

Tags: AI visibility, GEO, AEO, LLM search, generative engine optimisation, brand authority, earned media, PR strategy, AI fluency, communications capability, misinformation, board-level comms, thought leadership

Rachel O'Connor https://force4goodconsultancy.com
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