Public relations has always been one of the most powerful tools a business, nonprofit, or executive can invest in. Get media placements, nominations, speaking opportunities, and your credibility rises in a way advertising cannot duplicate. That has been true for decades, and it remains true today. What has changed is not PR’s value. It is the size of its reach.
Public relations, at its core, is the discipline of managing how an organization is perceived by the audiences that matter most: customers, donors, investors, and the public. Strategic communications is the framework that ties every message and every placement back to a coherent story and goals about who you are, what you do, and where you’re going. Increasingly, it is not just people. It is AI.
From Search Engines to Search Assistants
For two decades, the goal of digital visibility was ranking on Google. Search engine optimization was about keywords, backlinks, and technical site structure, all built to convince an algorithm that a page deserved a top spot.
Now, tools like ChatGPT search the live web and cite sources directly in their answers. When someone asks an AI assistant a question, that assistant has to decide, in real time, who is credible enough to mention. It is not pulling from a single source. It is weighing evidence across many.
I think of it this way: SEO helped brands rank in Google.
PR increasingly helps brands become the sources AI recognizes, retrieves, and cites.
Why This Matters More Than Most Business Owners Realize
Picture someone asking an AI assistant a question like, “Who is a respected child welfare expert in South Florida?” Or, “What organizations in Florida are working on affordable housing?” The AI has to answer that question by pulling together evidence. A website that says “we are experts in affordable housing” about itself is one data point. It is a weak one, because anyone can write that on their own homepage.
But an organization that has also been quoted in a national business publication, interviewed by a local television station, featured in a regional magazine, cited in a trade journal, and recognized by an industry association has built something much more convincing. It has built a trail of independent, third-party sources all pointing to the same conclusion. An AI system encountering that trail sees a pattern: this organization, this subject, this region, this level of credibility, repeated across multiple unrelated sources rather than claimed once by the organization itself.
That pattern is what earned media has always been good at creating. What has changed is that it now has a second audience beyond human readers.
A New Layer on an Old Value
For as long as I have worked in this field, I have told clients that media coverage builds credibility, that credibility compounds over time, and that it tends to improve visibility in a Google search. Both of those things remain true.
Now there is a third layer. Media coverage helps establish what AI systems understand an organization to be known for. Some people are calling this generative engine optimization, or AI search optimization. The terminology is still settling.
I have to be careful here, because this space invites a lot of overpromising. No agency, mine included, can guarantee that a single article gets permanently absorbed into how a given AI model was trained. That is not something public relations controls, and anyone who tells a client otherwise is not being straight with them. What is true, and what current AI search tools are built to do, is search the live web and cite relevant, credible sources in real time. That is a mechanism PR can absolutely influence, because it is largely a byproduct of doing PR well in the first place.
What an AI-Visibility Strategy Actually Looks Like
At Khanna Connections, this is changing how I think about earned media for every client we take on. A strong strategy in this new environment combines several things working together: earned media placements, authoritative expert quotes, consistent executive bios across platforms, a well-built press page, podcast appearances, industry awards and recognitions, owned thought leadership content, and a website that is technically accessible to the crawlers these AI systems use to find and read information in the first place.
That last piece matters more than people think. A brilliant press hit does very little if the website behind it is technically invisible to the tools trying to find it.
This is also exactly why I built Khanna House Studios alongside Khanna Connections. Earned media placements are powerful, but they work best when supported by consistent, high-quality owned content: video, photography, and production that reinforces the same expertise and the same story across every channel a client controls. And a coherent digital footprint is exactly what both search engines and AI systems are looking for.
Public relations is not just about being found on Google. It is about being found, understood, and cited correctly by the AI tools an increasing number of people now use to ask their first question. That is a real shift, and it makes PR more valuable in this next era, not less. The organizations that treat earned media as an investment in long-term digital credibility, rather than a one-time press release, are the ones that will show up when it counts, whether the one asking the question is a person or a machine.
