AI Generated image for Rachel’s Radar, from Force 4 Good Consultancy
Are we planning communications for a world that no longer exists? AI is changing how people find, assess and choose businesses. That makes reputation more important, not less.
Iwatched PESO Model® Live: Plan 2027 for How People Actually Find You this week. It built on a lot of the thinking I’ve already been exploring around trust, influence, GEO, and AI, but gave it a very practical lens for 2027 planning. [https://yo...8KIomTkRsM]
One question stayed with me: If AI increasingly influences who gets mentioned, cited, and recommended, are we still planning and measuring communications for a world that no longer exists?
I think, in many cases, we are.
For years, communications planning has tended to revolve around a familiar set of outputs: coverage, search rankings, social engagement, website traffic, share of voice and impressions. They’re not suddenly irrelevant. But they’re no longer the whole story. Because increasingly, the question isn’t simply: can people find you? It’s: do they trust you when they do? And now, increasingly: do the systems helping them make decisions recognise, trust, and recommend you too?
AI changes the discovery journey
The traditional customer journey was never quite as neat as the funnel suggested. Now it’s becoming even less so. Someone might encounter you through LinkedIn, ask ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot for recommendations, read a journalist’s article, check Reddit, visit your website, and ask a colleague before ever speaking to you. That makes influence much harder to see.
But it also makes something else incredibly important: authority.
One of the strongest points I took from the PESO Model® thinking was the different roles of owned and earned media.
Your own content helps establish what you know and what you stand for. Third-party sources help corroborate it. That’s an important distinction.
You can tell people you’re an expert. It becomes considerably more powerful when the wider ecosystem confirms it.
I’ve written about this before in my work on AI, GEO, and trusted visibility. My view remains that GEO isn’t really about gaming search. The organisations most likely to build visibility are those combining recognised expertise, useful, owned content, credible earned media, consistent thought leadership, and trusted third-party references. [
From visibility to authority
For me, this is the shift communications leaders need to understand for 2027.
For years we’ve chased visibility.
More coverage.
More posts.
More content.
More followers.
More traffic.
We need to start asking a harder question: Are we building enough authority around our business, people, and ideas that others choose to reference and recommend us?
That requires a different approach. Not content for content’s sake. Not another generic viewpoint because somebody said the CEO should post on LinkedIn twice a week. And definitely not 30 pieces of AI-generated SEO content saying roughly the same thing everyone else is saying.
It means deciding what you genuinely want to be known for, demonstrating expertise in it and then creating enough external validation that your authority travels beyond your own channels.
The return of earned influence
Ironically, AI may make PR more important, not less. But the definition of PR needs to expand. The opportunity isn’t simply to secure coverage in the publications we’ve traditionally considered prestigious.
It’s to understand:
Who influences the audiences we need to reach?
Which journalists, specialists, communities, and sources do those audiences trust?
Where are the conversations actually happening?
Which sources are AI tools drawing upon?
What questions are customers repeatedly asking?
Where do we already have genuine authority?
And, crucially, where are we invisible?
More like influence mapping than media relations.
And it connects to something else I’ve been exploring in Rachel’s Radar: the move away from indiscriminate one-to-many communications towards a more focused one-to-few approach.
The organisations that understand precisely who they need to influence, who influences those people and where those relationships sit will increasingly have an advantage over those simply broadcasting louder.
Less content. Better content.
Another idea from the session I really liked was the emphasis on a smaller number of substantial, authoritative content areas rather than endlessly feeding the content machine.
That makes sense to me. Start with the questions your customers genuinely ask. Build the best answers you can. Bring together expertise, evidence, research, commentary, customer experience, and genuinely useful information. Then use PR, thought leadership, social, community and paid activity to establish authority around the same territory.
Done properly, your channels stop acting as separate communications machines and start compounding each other. And this is where the latest evolution of the PESO Model® is particularly useful.
Spin Sucks now describes PESO as an integrated MarComm operating system, rather than simply four communications disciplines sitting alongside each other. Its premise is that Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned should reinforce one another, with each making the next stronger. [spinsucks.com]
For someone staring at a blank 2027 communications plan, that is a useful place to start.
What I’d do differently in 2027
1. Audit your AI visibility
Take the 10 to 20 questions that matter most commercially and see who ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot surface.
Where do you sit?
Absent → Mentioned → Cited → Recommended
Then repeat the exercise regularly. Don't treat a single search as gospel. You're looking for patterns and gaps.
2. Decide what you want to be known for
Choose a handful of areas where you genuinely have something credible and distinctive to say.
Trying to be visible everywhere is increasingly a recipe for being memorable nowhere.
3. Put names behind the expertise
Identify two or three people who can genuinely own particular subjects.
Give them evidence, data, opinion, and opportunities to build authority rather than simply asking them to “do some thought leadership.”
4. Create something worth citing
Original research. Proprietary data. A genuinely different perspective. Useful expertise. First-hand experience.
If your content could have been written by any of your competitors, why should a journalist, customer or AI system choose yours?
5. Map influence, not just media
Look beyond the traditional media list.
Journalists still matter, enormously.
But so do specialists, newsletters, podcasts, industry communities, customers, commentators, and peer networks.
Understand who shapes the thinking of the people you’re trying to reach.
6. Join up PESO properly
Don’t simply have separate Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned plans.
Think: Insight → original content → earned validation → conversation and sharing → targeted amplification → customer action → evidence → repeat. That’s an ecosystem rather than a collection of outputs.
7. Change the measurement conversation
Coverage and engagement can tell you something. But boards ultimately want to understand impact. I’d increasingly be looking at:
Discoverability → authority → consideration → enquiries → pipeline → revenue and reputation impact.
Communications cannot claim every sale. But we should be much better at demonstrating how influence contributes to the conditions in which sales happen.
My take
There’s a temptation to see AI as another channel that communications teams now need to “optimise for.” I think that’s too narrow.
What we’re really seeing is a change in how authority gets established and distributed. And that takes us back to some very old-fashioned principles.
Know who you’re for.
Have something useful to say.
Bring evidence.
Build relationships.
Earn trust.
Understand influence.
And stop confusing being visible with being valuable.
The technology may be changing at extraordinary speed.
The fundamentals of reputation aren’t.
I’ve been banging this drum for a while. In the first edition of Rachel’s Radar, my argument was that AI might change how organisations are discovered, but authority still comes down to expertise, evidence, and credible third-party endorsement.
The latest PESO Model® thinking adds weight to that, but importantly it gives us a practical way of doing something about it.
One to watch
If you’re responsible for a 2027 communications plan, I’d genuinely recommend being available for PESO Model® Live: Plan 2027 for How People Actually Find You. There’s much more in the session than I’ve covered here, and it’s well worth watching for yourself. [https://yo...8KIomTkRsM]
It’s also worth spending some time with the PESO Model® itself. Its evolution from communications framework to an integrated way of thinking about Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned is particularly relevant as discovery changes. [spinsucks.com]
And if you want to go further into the reputation and AI side of this, AMEC’s work on trusted visibility is worth a read too. It connects closely with my own view that simply appearing in an AI-generated answer shouldn’t be confused with trust, influence, or impact. [
For me, the challenge for 2027 isn’t how we produce more communications. It’s how we make the communications we produce work much harder together. And that feels like a much more useful place to start the planning conversation.