By Megan Johnstone-Mackie, PR and Marketing Manager, allpoints
Here we are again… yet another layer of marketing we need to wrap our heads around, because fundamentally, the way people find information is changing, and it’s happening fast.
For a very long time, and certainly as long as I have worked in marketing (15 years now!), online visibility followed a relatively predictable formula: write content, optimise your website, and pray to the Google gods for a higher ranking. All in the hope of driving traffic and landing leads and, whilst traditional search isn’t going to vanish overnight, businesses seriously need to wake up to how quickly the game is changing.
Instead of scrolling through pages of search results, more of us are turning to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to get direct answers to our questions. Research from Gartner found that traditional search engine volume is expected to decline by 25% by 2026 as users increasingly shift towards AI assistants and other virtual agents for information discovery. Meanwhile, news publishers expect search traffic to drop 43% over the next three years.
To see how fast this is happening, look at recent data from Adobe. They found that traffic arriving on websites from generative AI sources skyrocketed by 1,200% between July 2024 and February 2025 alone. While AI-driven traffic might still represent a relatively small slice of overall web visits right now, that kind of exponential growth proves just how quickly these platforms are hijacking the customer journey.
Not only this, but users are being pushed to use AI left, right and centre. Google, for instance, often pushes AI Overviews immediately ahead of traditional search results. Users get their answer right at the top, without ever having to click through to a website.
For businesses, this creates a pretty major challenge. If fewer people are actually clicking through traditional search results, how do you make sure your brand still gets found in the never-ending depths of the internet? In reality, the answer boils down to three core things: authority, credibility, and trust.
AI Doesn’t Care About Your Paid Ads
Research highlights just how large this shift really is: a vendor study cited by Gartner found that an enormous 95% of links referenced by AI search engines come from non-paid sources, while 27% originate directly from earned media coverage. This means that AI-generated responses aren’t pulling from your paid ads, they’re drawing heavily from earned and third-party sources.
Why PR is Your New Visibility Hack
AI engines also can’t easily crawl walled-off apps like Instagram or Facebook. Instead, they are aggressively pulling answers from open, indexed platforms where real experts are having public conversations, specifically LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube transcripts, and digital PR placements.
This is where PR suddenly becomes incredibly valuable for brands and businesses. A solid PR strategy creates exactly the kind of digital footprint these AI platforms are looking for.
We’re talking about:
- Publishing original research and fresh insights (because AI models love new data)
- Providing expert commentary and securing media interviews in trusted publications
- Landing industry features and guest articles that build your off-site credibility
- Getting on podcasts and speaking at industry events to build human-led authority
- Building real, ongoing relationships with trusted media outlets
- Creating high-value, searchable content on open platforms, such as long-form blog posts, LinkedIn articles, Reddit AMAs, or YouTube videos, that other people actually want to reference and link to.
While you can publish unlimited content on your own blog, independent coverage carries much more weight because it proves to the AI that other people consider you worth listening to. For example, when someone asks an AI tool for recommendations, industry trends, or expert opinions, the sources that pop up are usually the organisations and individuals who have built authority through media coverage, research, and thought leadership.
Building Authority for the Future
The businesses that are going to successfully navigate these changes are those that are building genuine authority in their sector. As AI search continues to evolve, visibility is going to depend entirely on trust and authority. For a lot of businesses, that means PR is very quickly becoming one of the most important visibility strategies out there. Time to get to work!