If you ask journalists and PR professionals what they fear most from AI, they will typically say variations on the same story: AI will make content creation so easy that their role will have little to offer. Pretty much any AI model these days can write passable articles and pitches (and then some), so it feels like the value of the human touch is questionable at best.
It is true that AI automates large parts of knowledge workand exactly how that will play out in the media and adjacent industries is still being determined. At the same time, AI is transforming information discovery. Billions of people now get information from AI experiences (chatbots or synthetic summaries like Google’s AI summaries) instead of traditional search results.
It’s clear that the way AI answering machines find and present information (how they filter, prioritize and interpret the things they find on the internet) will play a central role in the way media and public relations will work in the future. More importantly, it will determine how the two sides work together. And I mean ‘together’ in the most neutral way. Sometimes journalism and PR are complementary and sometimes they are in conflict, but in both cases AI will be the new interface where this plays out.
What I’m talking about, of course, is GEO (generative engine optimization), or rather the incentives it creates. It is often said that AI responses are the new “front door” of the internet because they are extremely popular (only ChatGPT has almost a billion users) and that popularity is growing. Google’s AI mode for search, which disables the “10 blue links” for an AI conversation, is now prominently featured on both the Google homepage and the Chrome omnibox. Some are to predict it will become the standard this year or next year.
That would (will?) be devastating for publishers (a topic for another column), and it would also immediately cement AI Digest as the new information portal for . . . Well, everyone. But it also suggests that the future that journalists and PR professionals fear, an arena in which the main weapons are automation and sloppy behavior, is flawed. Or at least incomplete.
Narrative is the new SEO
It all comes down to the way generative engines prioritize information. Both sides want their stories to become the basis of AI responses – PR for clients, media for themselves – in the hope of strengthening their authority. Good news for the media side: Studies show that AI portals prioritize journalistic content far above commercial content (such as a corporate blog or site).
That’s also good news for PR, as a large part of their work involves communicating with the media. If you think of the goals and messages of a PR campaign as one circle, and the stories a journalist wants to tell as another circle, then where these two circles overlap is the greatest opportunity for both parties to influence AI responses.
This is due to a fundamental difference between AI engines and search engines: AI looks for patterns instead of keywords. The more similar stories it sees across sites, domains, and social media, the more confident it will be in the summary it creates. Domain authority (the power of a specific URL) still matters, but actual authority is more important.
What that means in practice: If an AI engine sees that a site or person has covered the same topic over and over again, and from many different angles, and is often cited elsewhere, this will strengthen the authority signal. And that can matter just as much, if not more, than more general reporting from a major (Tier 1, to use PR jargon) publication.
This has two important consequences for the relationship between publicist and journalist. First, specialized journalists who focus exclusively on a particular beat have become more valuable. This also applies to publications, making trade/B2B cafés newly relevant. Second, while relationships with journalists are crucial in media relations, they are still only one part of a broader content strategy. There are other ways to build authority in the eyes of AI engines, including company blogs, social media, and more. Yes, journalists’ content is a priority, but the rest will reinforce the story the answer machine sees.
Beyond the byline
On the other hand, journalists have to play this game too. While their content comes first for GEO, if it is not unique it will not stand out from the competition. If it is too general or incomplete, AI engines will likely prioritize other content that is more specific and comprehensive. If AI doesn’t answer the common questions people ask, AI moves on to content that does.
All this is to say that in an AI world it is much better for a journalist to have a clear area of coverage than to be a generalist. But that’s just step one. Just as PR needs to build a story with a broader content strategy involving other platforms and formats, so should journalists.
Most journalists write articles for a living, but to better capture the attention of AI engines, it’s advisable to distribute those stories across different formats and platforms. Whether it’s creating a personal website or newsletter, attending events, or publishing in new formats like short videos or podcasts, the goal is to increase the visibility of the stories you tell: the stories people are asking about in ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity. Building your brand around them is a bonus.
The irony of all this is that AI initially promised to ease the burden of “content marketing” tasks like writing social media copy and SEO headlines, which virtually no journalist wanted to do. But it turns out that if you want to deploy GEO successfully, these tasks are amplified: you have to constantly think about the ways in which your stories can be presented and remixed to ensure that AI engines notice.
The upside is that it’s all inherently human. Generative engines look for patterns, but also prioritize the uniqueness within those patterns. And uniqueness is what people are best at. For journalists, it is the scoops and unearthed facts that produce fascinating stories. For PR, personal relationships remain the most reliable way to find connections to those stories. While AI is changing the way stories are found and told, the edge still lies with those who know how best to tell them.
#forces #journalists #work #smarter #louder