What are folks getting wrong about this? What are business owners missing about PR and AI search? Where are they kind of missing the mark?

So there's a few different areas and I think there's a myriad of mistakes people make.

The first one that we cite often and we see often both with clients and I think of what you called the LinkedIn-osphere at the beginning of the podcast is that People just rely on aggregate data for information.

So one week, people are saying, well, we got to get on Reddit because Google loves Reddit.

And we'll get on Wikipedia.

We'll be surfaced by ChatGPT.

These things are not untrue.

Because certainly, I mean, we can't cover those all in detail in a half hour interview, but It's certainly something worth diving into each portion of that in depth, but I'm sure it's going to depend on the client, what you're doing, right?

established company an established base of customers

The first thing you want to do is survey those customers and understand when they think about your industry, when they prompt an LLM about your industry, an AI engine about your industry, which AI engine or engines are these? And why do you want to do that? You want to do that because the source material for the same prompt on Cloud or ChatGPT or Gemini or AI overviews even is going to be radically different.

And so if you are some abstruse B2B software company and you go optimizing, say, for ChatGPT, when your user base, your customer base is using Cloud to ask questions, when they ask questions to an LLM about you, you may be completely wasting your time and money.

So the first step is always try to get a read on which LLM to optimize for or which LLMs plural to optimize for.

This to me is also the part of Jio that is like less discussed.

It's a very obvious step to me when you realize that these are almost separate ecosystems.

Each AI engine is almost its own thing.

Where can people look for those? How can they start to understand where they should be targeting?

How does PR

deal with that? So PR has a role to play.

It's a very interesting example first, and I appreciate you bringing it up because there's a lot of data to suggest exactly what you just said, which is that the best e-bike might be the seventh e-bike out of a set of six that I'm actually considering.

So I may not even, even though I'm looking for an e-bike and it's a considered purchase and it's not a candy bar, it costs money and all that, The seventh e-bike, which is the one that I don't even consider, don't even know about, might be the best fit for me, but I don't even bother with it because I know these other six brands and I limit my choice mentally to the six brands I know.

So there's a lot of the human brain processes things and simplifies this very complex world we all exist in by doing a range of kind of hacks and tricks.

And I think In the example you cited with the golf shirt, PR's role is to make sure that you are considering that a client's brand or a company's brand is in that sort of circle of consideration.

And it's something that we think about a lot.

Talk to me about some tactics that businesses can use on the PR front to build credibility and trust.

Yeah

... coming to them via AI.

And so we said, "What is going on here?" And quickly what we discovered was that AI engines rely on and pull from and like to cite earned media, which is obviously one of the main byproducts of PR.

And when I say earned media, just for the listeners, and I'm sure the listeners probably know what it is, I generally mean journalistic output, so editorial media coverage.

And what we decided was, you know what? The main output of our thing, of our PR thing, or one of the main outputs of it, this editorial media, is being super heavily cited by AI engines, large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini, and so we better get a closer look at this.

And from there it rolled down the hill, and I think the PR industry really caught onto this probably sometime in 2025, kind of early, early to mid-2025 it started to be a bigger thing, and it's been a boon for the industry.

It's been a boon for our business because for so long, as I said to you before we start, pushed record today, PR has always been this kind of red-headed stepchild that is viewed as a nice-to-have by some companies, is viewed as kind of mushy and unmeasurable, especially by the performance marketers who so dominate marketing departments these days.

... well, the, the key, the key challenge to you and what we're coming through in the briefs is how, how, how do we get presence in this new reality?