Why PR in the Age of AI Is About Getting Remembered by Machines, Not Just Humans

I’ve always championed the power of public relations because of its unparalleled ability to confer credibility through third-party endorsement. In a world drenched in paid promotion and self-written hype, a well-placed quote in the Financial Times or a paragraph in Fast Company can be worth more than a thousand banner ads. It carries the weight of a trusted, authoritative voice—something money can’t buy and algorithms can’t fake.

In many ways, it’s more powerful than paid placements or even shared media. Because when the message comes from someone else—especially someone respected—it lands harder and sticks longer.

But as the media landscape shifts, so must we. The goal of PR is no longer just to get seen by people. It’s to get remembered—and summarized—by machines. Because increasingly, they’re the ones answering the questions.

The Rise of AEO

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the new frontier. Think of it as SEO’s smarter, less link-obsessed cousin. Instead of optimizing for search engines to rank your page, you’re optimizing to ensure your content becomes part of the synthesized response an AI gives when someone asks a question.

This is what’s already happening with Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience), OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and tools like Perplexity. When you ask a question, they don’t give you ten blue links. They give you an answer in plain language. One that may quote your brand—or omit you entirely.

According to Gartner, 30% of users in developed markets now start product research with an AI tool, not Google. That number is growing fast. If your brand isn’t part of the answer set, you may as well not exist.

From Eyeballs to Machine Memory

The PR game hasn’t changed—it’s expanded. Yes, we’re still trying to influence human perception. But now we’re also trying to influence machine cognition. When AI answers a query, it’s pulling from a corpus of sources it has determined to be trustworthy. If your brand isn’t in that pile, you’ve lost relevance before the conversation even starts.

It’s not just about rankings. It’s about being quoted, cited, paraphrased, and remembered by tools that synthesize knowledge across the internet—and don’t link back when they do.

What This Means for PR

Here’s how to play in this new arena—without throwing out everything that already works.

1. Structure Your Content for the Machines (Without Sounding Like One)

This doesn’t mean writing robotic copy. It means presenting your content in ways that machines can digest.

Use clear headlines, bullet points, and natural Q&A formats, just like the ones AIs are trained on. And where it makes sense, use schema markup—a bit of behind-the-scenes code that tells AI tools what each part of your page is. Think of it as metadata for meaning: “this is the question,” “this is the answer,” “this is a quote.”

It’s especially useful for FAQs, how-tos, product pages, and explainers—anything that answers a direct query. You can generate schema using free tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and plug it into your CMS. It’s like adding subtitles to your content—so the bots don’t miss the point.But don’t overdo it. Schema won’t save weak content, and it’s not essential for narrative pieces or thought leadership. It’s a signal, not a strategy. Use it where structure already exists—and make sure the content itself is worth quoting.

2. Get Quoted in the Places the Bots Trust

AI models weigh content differently. A quote from Reuters or Wired will carry more authority in the synthesis model than a mid-tier blog—even if that blog has more traffic.

This means your PR team needs to prioritize not just reach, but reputation. Land the story where it matters to the model, not just to your media buyer.

A great example: Adobe—the global software company behind Photoshop and Premiere—launched its Firefly AI image-generation tool with crystal-clear messaging and media placement. Their quotes and product explanations were everywhere—from Wired to Fast Company. Now if you ask ChatGPT about Firefly, the AI parrots back the company’s own talking points.

3. Repurpose Your PR Wins for AI Visibility

Once you’ve landed coverage, don’t just clip it and move on. Repost the key insights on your own site—in your voice, with your metadata. Create a page that explains the topic further, links to the coverage, and summarizes your position. This increases the chance your content gets included in AI models during the next crawl or fine-tuning.

For example, Stripe—the global payments platform used by companies like Amazon and Shopify—takes every mention in tech media and turns it into structured, readable explainer content on their developer blog. It’s clean, accessible, and optimized for both humans and machines.

4. Monitor the Machines Like You Monitor the Press

Set prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Ask the questions you want to be part of. (“Who are the best cybersecurity firms?” or “What’s the difference between oat milk and almond milk?”)

See who’s getting mentioned. If it’s your competitor, dig into why. Where’s the model pulling it from? What phrases are sticking?Tools like Poe and Feedly AI can help you keep tabs on where your brand—and your competitors—are appearing in synthesized answers.

5. Train Your Executives to Be Quoted by a Bot

This one’s personal. We tell every executive client to prep for two audiences: humans and machines. Because today’s great soundbite isn’t just about landing in a media piece—it might be echoed back as the answer to an AI prompt months, or even years, from now.

That means your spokespeople need to deliver messaging that’s short, declarative, specific, and jargon-light. AI doesn’t need to be dazzled—it needs to understand. If your executive quote sounds like it came from a TED Talk written by a lawyer, it’s going to get skipped.

But here’s the nuance: writing and speaking for AI is not about flattening your voice or dumbing things down. It’s about clarity and structure. The best quotes still resonate emotionally and communicate authority—but they also function as modular statements that can be extracted and paraphrased without losing meaning. 

The balance is this: make it quotable for a journalist, understandable for an audience, and retrievable for a machine.

Take a page from HubSpot, the all-in-one platform for CRM, marketing automation, sales, and customer service. They didn’t become known for “inbound marketing” by accident. They repeated it with precision—across blog posts, interviews, presentations—until the internet absorbed it, and now it’s canon in every AI model. That didn’t happen by chance. It happened because their messaging was engineered to be remembered, reused, and summarized.

In this environment, your executives are not just spokespeople. They’re training the next wave of AI to talk about your brand. Make sure they’re saying something worth repeating.

PR isn’t disappearing—it’s expanding.

The goal is still visibility and credibility, but now it’s also about being referenced, summarized, and trained into the models shaping tomorrow’s answers.

We’re not just chasing page one anymore. We’re competing to be the sentence fragment that defines us in an AI response. That’s not a downgrade—it’s a new kind of influence. But only if you earn it.

The best brands in this next phase will stop thinking only in terms of coverage and start thinking in terms of summarization. If your PR can’t stand without a link, it won’t survive in a world where AI paraphrases you and leaves the source behind.

That said—the traditional value of exposure still matters. Humans still read headlines, browse feeds, and trust familiar names. You still want the right journalist, in the right outlet, to help tell your story. But now that story also needs to be clear, quotable, and structured in a way that lets AI understand it, remember it, and repeat it.

So don’t abandon what works. Strengthen it. Build relationships with editors and algorithms. Write for the reader and the response engine. Structure for search and for synthesis.

In the end, it’s not about choosing one or the other. It’s about doing PR in a way that earns you visibility—across every channel that matters now, and every intelligence that’s learning to speak.