As Outdoor Industry PR professionals, we’ve grown accustomed to the notion that most of our family and friends won’t quite understand what we do. And, to be honest, explaining what we do has changed a lot over the last 3 years. The PR world is shifting rapidly as it converges with artificial intelligence and the evolving media landscape, and it appears, at least for the foreseeable future, that PR is more important than ever in the modern consumer product/brand discovery journey. As a result, we will be publishing a 3-part blog series that helps explain what’s happening at the intersection of AI, Media, and PR.
In Part 1, we’re going to answer the following question: Why is PR relevant in the AI landscape?
Adoption of AI in Product and Brand Discovery
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are replacing Google as the first stop for product discovery inquiries, an unimaginable development just four years ago. Recent survey data reveals that 45% of Americans use AI-powered search to look for information online. Move over, Google, there’s a new juggernaut providing personalized responses, upending the product and brand discovery playbook most brands have been using for the past decade.
AI-powered search tools’ ability to provide contextual recommendations is, frankly, awesome. Instead of having to Google “Best Sit-Inside Kayak” and wade through listicles and product round-ups to determine the right kayak for a family, a consumer can now start with a more natural, intent-driven query, like “What’s the best sit-inside kayak for freshwater paddling lakes and slow-moving rivers? It needs to be easily car-topped on a Subaru Forester.” Then, in seconds, AI tools generate a comprehensive, tailored response with useful information synthesized from multiple sources. This saves time, reduces decision-making fatigue, and often cites trusted content sources.
Through AI tools, we can receive more context-rich, personalized answers without having to sift through search engine results to click on relevant links. These benefits are changing the way people search for information online.
The Zero-Click Trend
58% of online searches no longer result in a click. This is what’s known as the zero-click trend. AI tools are answering consumer queries directly—summarizing content from credible sources and eliminating the need to visit webpages in some instances. As Klaudia Jazwinska, an AI Researcher and journalist at Columbia University, put it in a recent NPR story, “I totally understand the temptation. Why click on a bunch of sources when you can just get a summary?”
This zero-click trend is severely impacting the organic traffic that many digital-first media outlets rely on from Google. According to some estimates, many media sites have seen a decrease in organic traffic from search engines of up to 20% year-over-year. The brand and product discovery infrastructure is shifting.
Brands that show up more consistently in these AI responses will dominate the discovery phase. This is where PR can do some of the heavy lifting: helping brands appear where people are searching for product/brand information, which now increasingly includes generative AI answers.
The Role of PR
Generative AI platforms prioritize credibility, topic authority, and relevant sources over traditional SEO factors like keywords and backlinks. Journalistic articles serve as excellent training material, helping AI determine credible content and an answer structure that is easily readable for humans.
As Jazwinska puts it, “News content is in great demand by AI companies. That won’t go away, chatbots can’t report, that’s something that journalists can do and robots cannot.”
This content gets ingested, indexed, and cited by AI tools because it’s treated as more reliable than advertising and less biased than brand-owned content. Generative AI tools look for key signals to decide what to cite when recommending products or brands in an AI search query. These include a high number of editorial mentions to indicate brand/product credibility, well-structured schema (a fancy way of saying AI can easily understand and organize the content) to assist with parsing and categorizing content, and clear subject matter expertise to prioritize topic authority.
As AI models process an article, they do so by breaking it down into layers of understanding, starting broad and then narrowing in scope. First, they look for entities like brand and product names, then relationships to form an understanding of the “who,” the “what,” and the connections to the product/brand use case. Then, they scan for claims, qualifiers, and comparisons to signal credibility and differentiate products. Finally, tone and sentiment are analyzed to shape perceived reputation.
How PR Supports AI Visibility
For brands, maximizing visibility across AI platforms means prioritizing strategic PR. Recently, Muck Rack released a study examining how Generative AI systems cite sources and respond to user prompts, aiming to characterize the nature of AI-generated responses across various use cases and platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini).
The study analyzed over 1 million citations from a diverse array of prompts, and the findings are definitive: earned media/PR is a must for AI visibility. 89% of the links cited in the study are related to earned media, while the remaining 11% of citations were attributed to owned content and advertising. The study also found that aspects like outlet authority, clear content expertise, and recency of article affect the frequency and likelihood of being cited.
Where to Go From Here
The convergence of AI, media, and PR represents a crossroads in brand discovery. The growing influence of generative AI tools gives PR professionals a powerful new avenue to support brand visibility. For companies willing to invest in thoughtful PR, this is a moment to rise to the top of a new discovery hierarchy.
However, this shift in consumer search habits delivers challenges. The zero-click trend and AI’s summarization of media content, without always driving traffic back to its source, pose serious threats to journalists and digital publications. Many outlets are seeing steep declines in organic traffic, despite providing the credible, high-quality content that AI models rely on to deliver accurate responses.
In Part 2 of this series, we will address how the media landscape is shifting and how media entities are adapting in this tumultuous moment of digital change.