PR pros have discovered how to influence the chatbots: Talk to a ...
As the sprawling public relations industry scrambles to figure out how to buffer its clients’ brands and reputations through the new medium of artificial intelligence chatbots, some firms have reached a surprising conclusion: The best way to get your client’s message into the output of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest is by talking to journalists.
Firms, whose services now often include regularly testing clients’ reputations with AI models, are finding that authoritative publications — including declining local news outlets and specialist trade journals — shape the results of chatbot queries about a given company far more powerfully than a social media campaign or Reddit thread could. The result is a striking reversal of the status quo at a moment when PR executives had begun to enjoy the social media-era option of ignoring journalists entirely.
“Earned media still matters, but not the way people think,” said Carreen Winters, who leads the reputation practice at MikeWorldWide, using the trade term for independent reporting. The firm is launching a service this week called “PreBunk” that’s designed, according to a draft press release shared with Semafor, to provide an “ongoing proactive ‘education’ of the LLMs about your company and its reputation.”
Consumers, according to Winters, say, “I’m not going to trust earned media — I’m going to trust the internet.” But these LLMs’ sources lead back to journalism, something she said can sometimes be a hard sell to executives who thought they no longer had to deal with pesky reporters.
SEO and AI Interactions
The PR industry is navigating the rise of AI in parallel with the overlapping but more technical SEO trade, which is adjusting its sights from bringing clients’ websites up search results to elevating them in AI excerpts on Google and elsewhere. One place they converge is in encouraging companies to add pages to their website aimed at LLM, not human, consumers.
The SEO professionals are finding, however, that for now AI is largely relying on the same rankings that search engines use — though sometimes in unpredictable ways. A brief from the enterprise SEO marketing company BrightEdge, for instance, cites as “one of the most important discoveries” about Anthropic’s Claude the fact that it relies on the lesser-used search engine Brave for its rankings; companies will need to ensure they’re being indexed by Brave to feed their official line to Claude.
There’s something heartening, from the perspective of the humans in the media business, about the practice of gaming digital media becoming less technical, after a long march in which advertising and marketing were essentially swallowed by ad tech and practices like SEO.
The Impact of AI on Journalism
Dealing with LLMs is “more like traditional PR than it is like SEO,” Ben Worthen, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who founded the agency Message Lab, told me. That’s good news, in particular, for the PR industry, which gainfully employs its share of human beings, as well as some former journalists.
But even if the LLMs find this kind of authoritative journalism valuable, and even if companies will pay to employ publicists to pitch their stories, it’s not clear where that process meets news organizations’ business models. The darkest warnings about the power of AI have to do with the “liar’s dividend” that renders accurate journalism pointless.
The theory is not that deepfakes will persuade people to believe anything in particular, but that they’ll make people disbelieve everything. Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron coined the term in a 2019 essay arguing that “a skeptical public will be primed to doubt the authenticity of real audio and video evidence. This skepticism can be invoked just as well against authentic as against adulterated content.”
