Can PR Help with AI Search?

Organic traffic is going down for many startup sites. For those without large paid media programs, this is a problem since organic is the primary source of traffic. Why is it going down? Buyers might be searching less as they are distracted by events in Washington and fearful of recession. There was a major Google Core Algorithm update in December 2024, which mainly impacted sites it viewed as spammy (sorry if this was you). Then, of course, there’s zero-click search – the void we are all fueling with our own behavior.

Zero-click Search and AI Traffic

The theory is that zero-click search will send lower traffic volumes at higher intent. Is that true? First, you need to see how much traffic you are getting from the primary AI search tools, form a basic understanding of the type and intent of queries happening on these tools that used to happen exclusively on traditional search engines, and then analyze how that traffic behaves (what landing pages, navigation pattern, conversion rates).

Example Firebrand Looker Dashboard: AI Traffic Sources

In general, we are seeing this traffic as informational at present but highly engaged, which is supported by a recent study by SEMrush and Statista showing that “informational” search intent is the largest category after “unknown” (representing query intent that is inherently too complex for traditional search and thus not a factor in the decline in impressions and traffic). 

Investigating ChatGPT Search: Insights from 80 Million Clickstream Records

It is too soon to tell whether it converts to opportunities, given the length of the average sales cycle in B2B and the novelty of this traffic. We might know more in 90 days if attribution lookback windows are long enough. We’ll certainly get a sense of it by summer.

AI Search Presence and Visibility

Next, it would be good to know how your brand is showing up in AI Search. There are not many tools to do this, but you could try SEMrush, Otterly or Trackerly. They basically prompt for your brand and associated keywords across the primary chatbots each day and save the results. This will show ‘share of voice’ against competitors, the prompts where your brand shows up and where it doesn’t, but competitors do. That can inform your content strategy – on the assumption you can get that content into the model somehow. 

Which brings us to the next issue – how do you change your presence in AI Search? There are numerous theories, but it’s a good assumption that the chatbots are scraping the web, including brand sites, social forums like Reddit, and prominent news sources. Some AI companies have licensing agreements with publishers and social networks to ingest their content, while others are engaged in lawsuits to prevent it. 

Increased Importance of SEO Content Creation

Content creation has long been the engine room of SEO. The good news is that AI Search loves informational content too. If you look at the landing pages from ChatGPT and Perplexity to your site, you’ll likely see complex how-to blog posts, and all those pillar pages and technical glossaries you have been producing for traditional search. This makes sense – if your company is an expert in a specific domain and publishes content about it on your site, the AI crawlers will ingest it and cite you as a source. But be warned: if your content isn’t specific or deep, it’s unlikely to be surfaced. 

For instance, the one-paragraph definition of terms you see on sites needs to be 2,000-word explanations or more to stand out and contain both questions and answers related to your seed (main) keyword. You can’t use AI to create that content since, by definition, it’s already in the model. We can’t know for certain, but it would make sense for the models to record the provenance for particular expertise so they can reference the canonical source, not derivatives created by its outputs. Slop in–slop out.

For now, keep cranking away at the SEO content creation if you want to win in an AI Optimization era.

How PR Helps with AI Search

But SEO experts now have a new set of friends: the PR team. Guess who places all those stories about your brand in publications, podcasts and newsletters? Who works with influencers to carry your messages to their audiences? Who manages the social media channels and who might even handle community building on forums like Reddit? Yup – the PR team has long been charged with earned, owned, paid and social media; now those very outlets are being slurped up by the AI crawlers.

PR’s impact on SEO isn’t new. Just search for a topic like ‘best luggage’ and you’ll see publications like Wirecutter rank near the top. You will still find folks who like to issue press releases over the wire for SEO reasons (false btw). But this is perhaps a new era where the value of PR in influencing AI Search is on the rise. Rand Fishkin of SparkToro just published a video explaining this theory. In the face of declining readership for many media outlets, its influence on AI Search offers a new audience and fresh returns.

Some SEOs have been doing what they call ‘digital PR’ for some time now. This essentially amounts to guest blog posting and has little to do with the media relations, thought leadership, and community engagement that a more robust PR program would involve. So the concept isn’t new, but those digital PR efforts never resulted in coverage in the New York Times or even The NewStack, for that matter. 

Today the link between PR proper and SEO has never been stronger. So, what does that mean for the PR program? Start by looking at the prompt returns to see where the brand is weak compared to the competition, then feed that topic into pitch ideas, bylines, influencer and sponsored content so the deficiencies can be addressed.

AI Search is here. It’s going to reduce your organic traffic, but the interest has just moved to the chatbots – and you need to show up strongly over there. Stick to the fundamentals of SEO keep going with your content-fueled SEO program and perhaps your new friends in PR can help too.