Why media still matters to business in the age of AI

Author – Jon Clements, Metamorphic PR

“In the internet era it was all about search and find; in an AI world, it’s more about question and answer.”

This was what journalist and editor Jonathan Barrett at Sustainable Engineering told a recent CIPR STEM webinar about the behaviour shift in people seeking information online today.

And where Google search has tended to allocate high authority and therefore high organic search ranking to content featured in independent media, AI appears to be doing something similar. Equally, it’s a way to identify where a company’s communications activity needs to compete harder.

Relating to the first point, for example, a two-stage prompt in ChatGPT about a topic relevant to a Metamorphic PR client (the first, a “how to…?” question followed by a “where does this advice come from?” question) returned media coverage achieved for the client. This points to the ongoing potency of media coverage in the marketing communications mix for an AI-using audience.

And to the second point, in a separate example using similar prompts a client company wasn’t cited by the AI tool, but its competitors were. When prompted with “where does this advice come from?”, a key source highlighted was case study content on company websites – something the client doesn’t yet have. So, if AI queries in this market are influenced by case study content, that’s another tactic for the company to explore.

Public relations activity – including media relations and owned content creation – is shaping up to be a key component for companies’ communications activity in the AI era. As it was for the internet era and the pre-internet era…