Digital PR and AI: how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

84% of the citations generated by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity come from content published in third-party outlets, not from the brand's website. If your company has no earned media strategy built for AI engines, you're handing visibility to your competitors without even noticing.

Is it really worth rethinking Digital PR for AI engines?

Yes, and it's not optional: 91% of brand mentions in AI results are found on third-party domains, not on the company website. If you don't cover earned media, you leave the field wide open to competitors.

AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini don't treat your website as their first source. They read what others write about you: articles in industry publications, press releases picked up by newspapers, interviews, reviews on authoritative platforms. That's earned media: the visibility you earn because someone credible talks about you, not because you bought the space.

The practical consequence is simple: if your company doesn't appear in authoritative third-party sources, AI engines don't cite it. And if they don't cite it, it doesn't exist for people searching with these tools.

What's really happening: why has earned media become the AI channel?

AI engines favor authoritative third-party sources because they consider them more trustworthy than the brand's own site. 84% of AI citations come from earned media, and the figure has held steady for almost a year.

A Muck Rack study of 25 million cited links across 17 industries measured what AI engines actually read when they build their answers. The result is clear: 84% of citations come from earned media, meaning articles in publications, authoritative blogs and specialized forums. Paid content, such as advertorials and sponsored press releases, makes up just 0.3% of the total. You can read the full analysis on AuthorityTech.

The reason is structural: AI models are trained to prefer independent sources, because they treat them as signals of credibility. An article in an industry publication is worth far more than a page on your own site, even if that page is perfectly optimized.

A second data point changes the priorities for marketers: according to an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, brand mentions on third-party sites correlate with visibility in AI Overviews (Google's AI answers) with a coefficient of 0.664. Traditional backlinks, the inbound links classic SEO has chased for twenty years, stop at 0.218. That's a predictive advantage roughly three times greater. The data is available on Sightivo.

Why it's being talked about now: is the AI market in Italy really ready?

The Italian AI market reached €1.8 billion in 2025, growing 50% in a year. The window to position yourself ahead of competitors is open, but it's closing.

Traffic from AI engines grew 16x between 2024 and 2026, based on a sample of over 100,000 websites analyzed by SE Ranking. ChatGPT alone generates 74.78% of this referral traffic. You can find the details on GeoAura.

In Italy, the Osservatorio Artificial Intelligence at Politecnico di Milano has confirmed that the AI market reached €1.8 billion in 2025, up 50% from 2024. You can read the details on AI4Business. Italian companies are adopting AI tools at a fast pace: if you don't build your visibility on these channels now, you'll find the road already taken in 12-18 months.

What changes in practice: who does what in an AI-optimized PR strategy?

Digital PR for AI engines is not just about sending press releases. It requires coordination between the people who produce content, those who manage media relations and those who monitor AI visibility.

The difference from traditional PR lies in the end goal: it's not enough for a journalist to write about you. They need to write about you in a way that AI engines recognize as authoritative and relevant. That means taking care of the format, context and distribution of your content, not just the relationship with the publication.

Three concrete scenarios: what changes for an e-commerce, a professional firm, and a manufacturing company?

The impact of AI visibility varies by industry, but the mechanism is the same: if you're cited by the sources AI engines read, you show up in the answers. If you're not, you don't exist.

Let's look at three typical situations. The numbers are illustrative: they show the reasoning and are not real client data.

What they have in common is that AI traffic converts better. According to Semrush data (July 2025), visitors from AI search convert on average 4.4 times more than users from traditional organic search. Ahrefs found an even more extreme case: AI traffic was 0.5% of total sessions but generated 12.1% of sign-ups, a 23x ratio. Source: Sightivo.

Which content and formats work best for getting cited by AI engines?

AI engines prefer content with original data, clear structure and recognizable sources. Generic press releases are no longer enough.

Not all PR content carries the same weight with AI engines. HubSpot's guide on AEO for Digital PR — where AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, meaning optimization for engines that give direct answers instead of lists of links — shows that the most-cited content has specific characteristics.

One often underestimated aspect is the structure of the text: clear headings, short paragraphs, explicit questions and answers. AI engines extract snippets of text to build their answers — and they prefer texts already organized to answer a specific question. On this topic, the article on brand context and AI goes deeper into how to change what the engines say about you.

Which platforms and tools can measure your brand's AI visibility?

Traditional SEO tools don't measure AI citations. You need dedicated tools to track how often and in what context your brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google.

Measuring AI visibility is the first step to understanding whether your PR strategy is working. As explained in the article on AI visibility as a new metric for SMEs, most Italian companies still don't track this data.

What risks and rules should you know before launching a PR campaign for AI?

The main trap is confusing earned media with disguised paid content. AI engines recognize (and penalize) inauthentic content, and advertising transparency regulations also apply to digital content.

Some companies look for shortcuts: sponsored articles presented as editorial, paid links on low-quality sites, press releases mass-distributed on worthless aggregator portals. These tactics don't work with AI engines — and they risk damaging your brand's reputation if associated with unethical practices.

On the regulatory side, in Italy the Codice del Consumo and the guidelines of the AGCM (Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, the Italian competition authority) on transparency in commercial communications apply. Sponsored content must be identified as such, even when published on a third-party publication.

How do you get started? The steps to launch an AI-optimized PR strategy

You start by listening: understand what AI engines already say about your brand and your industry. Then you build a PR editorial plan with the right formats and the right publications.

Before producing any content, assess where you stand today. Search for your company name and your products on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google with AI Overviews turned on. Note what shows up, from which sources and in what tone. That's your starting point.

If you also want to learn how to optimize your site's technical presence for AI crawlers, the article on sitemaps and RSS for AI crawlers covers the infrastructure side. PR and technical SEO complement each other.

What are the most common mistakes people make when starting with PR for AI engines?

The most common mistake is treating PR for AI like traditional PR: same press release, same publications, same logic. AI engines use different criteria than human journalists.

People approaching this topic for the first time tend to make the same mistakes. Here they are, in order of frequency.

How do you know if your PR strategy for AI is working?

The signals to track differ from those in traditional SEO: it's not just about Google rankings, but about citations in AI answers and the quality of the traffic they generate.

AI visibility is measured with specific indicators. Some are new, others are reworked versions of familiar metrics. What matters is tracking them regularly — at least once a month — and comparing them over time.

To explore how AI visibility intersects with traditional SEO and with Google alternatives, the article on alternative search engines in 2026 offers an up-to-date picture of the landscape.

So, is it worth investing in PR for AI engines for your company?

Worth it if you already have a solid digital presence and want to boost your visibility on ChatGPT and Perplexity, or you're in a competitive industry where customers do complex research before buying.

Somewhere in between: you're just starting to build your digital presence. Start with your website and technical SEO, then add PR for AI as a second layer.

Not yet if your business is purely local and your customers don't use AI engines to search for your products or services — but test that assumption before ruling it out.

How we see it at SHM

For us, Digital PR for AI engines isn't a trend to chase: it's the logical consequence of a change that has already happened in how people look for information. AI engines read the web as a distributed reputation system — and reputation is built with authoritative content on third-party sources, not with paid campaigns.

We've worked with manufacturing and B2B companies that had excellent technical websites but zero presence in third-party media. The problem wasn't the website: it was that nobody was talking about them outside their own ecosystem. Building that external presence — with content designed to answer their customers' real questions — was the step that changed their visibility, including on AI engines.

We believe AI should be integrated to free companies from routine, not to replace human ingenuity. In the case of PR for AI, that means using AI tools to identify the right questions and track citations, while leaving the building of media relationships and the creation of content with an authentic point of view to human intelligence.

If you want to understand where your brand stands today in AI visibility and how to improve it, we can help with a tailored strategy: from SEO for AI to the strategic integration of AI into your marketing processes, all the way to business intelligence to measure results. You can find all the articles in the SEO and AI visibility cluster to dig deeper into every aspect of this topic.

Have specific questions about your company's situation? Write to us.

Frequently Asked Questions

You can't buy AI visibility. You earn it by publishing content that others consider worth citing.