Wag The Dog: strategic communications insights

There's a persistent assumption in comms that owned media is a secondary channel — a home for corporate announcements, reformatted press releases, and product updates that exist because someone decided there should be a blog. The real work, the thinking goes, happens in earned media. Owned is the support act. That assumption is now costing brands visibility, trust, and revenue in the one channel that's reshaping how companies get found and chosen: generative AI search. The data that should be on every CMO's desk Hard Numbers' Reputation in the Age of AI study analysed how GPT-4 talks about Forbes' top 100 brands across trust, quality, innovation, and value. The top-line finding is expected: editorial media drives 61% of generative AI responses. But company-owned channels are the second most frequently used source, at 44% — and by far the easiest to update and control. The category-level data is where it gets interesting. LLMs place significant weight on owned media for innovation claims (66%) and quality (55%), often taking company statements at face value even when explicitly asked whether a brand is trustworthy. Your owned content isn't just being indexed. It's being cited. The question is whether what's there is worth citing, or whether it's the same boilerplate you uploaded two years ago and haven't touched since. Overlay buyer behaviour and this stops being theoretical. G2's 2025 Buyer Behaviour report shows 79% of B2B buyers say AI has changed how they do research. Twenty-nine percent now start that research with LLMs more often than Google. Semrush data puts AI-sourced visitors at roughly 4.4 times the economic value of traditional organic search traffic. Visibility in AI answers isn't a vanity metric. It's a revenue lever. Which is why getting both your earned and owned content into those answers matters commercially, not just reputationally. What good actually looks like When I was working with Microsoft across Asia, their owned news engine — Microsoft Source — was run with journalistic discipline. Not as an aspiration. As an operating standard. Blogs had editorial rigour. Customer resource centres were structured for discovery, not just compliance. Executive content carried a deliberate narrative arc that connected product launches to customer outcomes to market perspective. Product storytelling wasn't an afterthought bolted onto launch week — it was part of a sustained publishing rhythm. And here's the part most brands miss: the owned engine made the earned outreach better. When a journalist looked at what Microsoft was already publishing, the substance was visible before the pitch arrived. The owned content wasn't competing with earned — it was underwriting it. Owned as an ally for earned, not a substitute. That's the model. And it's the opportunity most brands are leaving on the table. The gap isn't technology. It's editorial discipline. The comms industry's instinct is to frame every shift as a technology problem. AI is changing search, so you need AI tools. GEO is the new SEO, so you need a GEO platform. The framing keeps budgets flowing toward new capabilities while the underlying content stays exactly the same. But the real gap is editorial. Most owned media underperforms in AI search for the same reason it underperforms with human readers: it's generic, it's self-serving, and it doesn't say anything a competitor couldn't also say. An LLM deciding which source to cite for a question about innovation in enterprise software is doing something remarkably similar to what a journalist does when deciding who to quote. It's looking for specificity, authority, and substance. If your owned channels read like a marketing department wrote them — because a marketing department did write them — they'll be passed over for the same reasons a journalist would pass on a thin pitch. The fix isn't a GEO audit bolted onto the existing content operation. It's a commitment to treating your owned media like a publication: editorial standards, publication rhythms, stories that earn the right to be cited. Where this lands The brands that show up consistently in AI-generated answers over the next three years won't be the ones that invested in the most sophisticated AI tooling. They'll be the ones that looked at their owned media ecosystem — the blogs, the resource centres, the executive platforms, the customer stories — and asked a straightforward question: Would a journalist cite this? If so, would an LLM? And if the answer was no, they had the discipline to rebuild it until the answer was yes. Not because generative AI search is a trend worth chasing, but because the standard it demands — specificity, substance, editorial rigour — is the standard their content should have met all along. Owned media has always been the channel brands have the most control over. Now it's also the channel where that control translates most directly into how AI represents you. The lowest-hanging fruit is right there. Most brands just haven't reached for it yet. Read more of my perspective on Owned media's potential in Campaign Asia: https://tinyurl.com/4zjfbm8h

For the last 12 months, I have been compiling a working encyclopaedia of the best thinking on how generative AI is reshaping brand visibility and commercial outcomes. For communications professionals, the early GenAI hype has now given way to a healthy wariness about a permanent fixture that is both opportunity and nemesis. Monthly chatbot visits are already north of seven billion, approaching ten per cent of traditional search traffic, and close to half of Copilot’s conversations are commercial in nature. People are now researching, comparing and buying products inside answer engines, highlighting why both brand visibility and the quality of this citation in those environments matters. The second point is moot, and Hard Numbers’ work with Onclusive shows that when your brand shows up in generative search, highly positive earned sentiment makes you around three times more likely to win head‑to‑head commercial comparisons. The paradox for me is that many communicators still see GenAI as a black box they are “keeping an eye on” rather than a channel their teams must use and drive now. Right away, that usage accountability gap is an own goal. Boston Consulting Group estimates that communications could reclaim 26–36 per cent of its time through GenAI today, rising to 34–47 per cent once teams redesign their workflows. The mandate is set. If you are a head of communications wondering where to start, here are five moves that will help take you from GenAI Zero to Hero. 1. Reset the mindset: your earned‑first superpower The first move is not a tool; it is a mindset. We are in the midst of a communications reset with the storyteller back at the centre, framing stories that both humans and algorithms recognise as credible. Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse shows that the vast majority of sources cited in AI answers are non‑paid third‑party sites – journalism, industry outlets, government databases, niche publishers – and that a small group of outlets account for a disproportionate share of citations. In that environment, earned attention does not just build reputation; it defines how machines surface and recommend you. Communications teams need to stop treating this as someone else’s problem and see it as opportunity. Narrative architecture, operational fluency, media literacy and getting the story straight across constituencies are the critical bridge between human stakeholders and machine discovery. No one else in the organisation is trained for that. 2. Follow the thread: benchmark where you stand New terrain requires a ball of string to remember the route we have travelled. For GenAI, that means continual measurement and refinement. Expand beyond traditional media and keyword rankings into generative and “zero‑click” surfaces, and track where your brand appears there over time. A quarterly AI search benchmark is a good starting point. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot and rigorously ask the questions your buyers would ask: “Who are the leading X providers?”, “What is Y known for?”, “Who should I hire for Z?”. Capture where and how your brand appears, what is missing, which competitors show up, and which sources are cited. Treat this as a baseline you intend to move, just as you would share of voice or reputation scores. What gets measured gets managed, even if the dashboards are for now imperfect. 3. Get your own house in order: machine‑readable credibility You must also provide both people and models with content that is worth repeating. AirOps’ analysis of more than half a million brand pages retrieved by ChatGPT shows that only 15 per cent are ever cited; 85 per cent are ignored. Pages with clear title–query alignment more than double their citation chances, and readable language and mid‑range domain authority tend to outperform jargon‑heavy pages on huge but bland sites. Ahrefs’ earlier work points in the same direction: branded web mentions – how often and how widely you are discussed – correlate more strongly with AI visibility than classic backlinks. For comms, this is low‑hanging fruit. Sharpen your “about” pages, FAQs, leader bios, case studies and thought leadership. Then think like an LLM: is your explanation of who you are consistent, precise and easy to lift? Does it exist in places that models treat as trustworthy such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia, YouTube transcripts and relevant Reddit communities? The goal is not more content; the goal is targeted, machine‑readable credibility. 4. Put LinkedIn and Reddit on the front row Next, accept and embrace the other entities where the new gatekeepers get their inputs. Semrush’s citation work across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Google’s AI experiences recently put Reddit as the most cited domain (around 11.3 per cent), LinkedIn second (about 11 per cent), followed by Wikipedia and YouTube. This is where real people argue, explain and recommend, and it is feeding generative search. LinkedIn’s own engineering team has recently confirmed that its rebuilt feed uses LLM‑based embeddings to model topical expertise and engagement history, which means regular, high‑quality contributions on your core themes travel much further than sporadic broadcast posts. Your executives’ LinkedIn presence is therefore a discovery channel, not a vanity project. And if you are absent from the LinkedIn and Reddit conversations that define your category, then AI systems will happily learn from whoever is there instead. 5. Assign real ownership and protect experiments Finally, none of this happens by osmosis. Both the IPR and Cision point to the same organisational problem: responsibility for AI search visibility sits across SEO, brand, comms and product, which means it risks being nobody’s job. The fifth move is to assign ownership and protect experimentation. Give a named person or team a 90‑day mandate to own generative visibility: map where you are, prioritise the prompts and categories that matter most, identify the two or three biggest proof gaps, and run structured tests on what gets remembered and repeated. Borrow from marketing’s 70:20:10 rule; keep the engine running, but ring‑fence time and budget for GEO experiments rather than waiting for a crisis to force change. The slow‑lane reverie – that “everyone else is behind, we will catch up later” – simply means the ten per cent who are already doing this will soon be lapping you in visibility, trust and influence. This is no time for wallflowers Five moves, starting with mindset, are enough to get moving. Your ability to connect across cultures and audiences, to turn complexity into explanation and trust, is exactly what will enhance your position in the organisation and keep you shoulder to shoulder with other disciplines in a genuinely integrated team.  This is communications’ moment, not its demise.

As artificial intelligence takes over more of our operational process, rewards will come for those who focus on the one thing that machines are really bad at: articulating a story that humans and algorithms both trust. Storytelling is back, according to Simon Murphy, founder of Indigo Murphy. Globally, white-collar work has become the next cost base driving wild market swings, with Wall Street acting like “a mob with bats” , indiscriminately searching for the next industry to be hit by AI automation. This is a familiar theme being felt across the communications sector right now, especially in holding company land where consolidation is both a cost and capability play. The Omnicom–IPG merger , for example, has focused on an estimated US$750 million in annual cost savings tied to severance and “structural expense savings” that will be reinvested in data and AI. On the surface, it’s about productivity: AI taking on junior production, research and reporting so networks run leaner. Take a look underneath though, and something more interesting is happening. As generative models flood the world with cheap content (aka “AI slop”), brand leaders are rediscovering that what still differentiates isn’t volume, but the human ability to frame a story that clients, regulators, employees and machines recognise as credible. Key to this according to Professor Scott Galloway are three human skills make you “irreplaceable in an AI world” and should sit within the DNA of any good PR consultant: namely curation, curiosity and connectivity. In a recent episode of his Pivot podcast, Galloway even singles out strategic communications as one of the few jobs he’d bet on being not just safe, but even more important in the AI age. This is encouraging for current and aspiring storytellers, and it is a signal that is being validated elsewhere. Business Insider recently noted that the hottest job in tech right now isn’t a coder, it’s a storyteller. Netflix advertised a director of product and technology communications role paying a staggering US$775,000, median Fortune 500 CCO pay rose by US$50,000 in 2025 to between US$400,000 and US$450,000, and Linkedin posts mentioning “storyteller” doubled over 12 months. The double-edged truth here is that as agencies cull their juniors in a brutal quest to maintain profit, the market is paying a premium for storytellers who can set and defend the narrative. Three AI-related forces explain this return to vogue. First, generative AI has created a flood of verbose, generic content (the current state of “thought leadership” on LinkedIn is a moot point in my opinion). Not everyone should presume they can write, which is why former journalists often make the Chief Storyteller transcendence so capably. Second, AI has changed where trust is formed. Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse study found that 94% of sources cited in AI answers are non-paid third-party sites: journalism, industry outlets, government databases and niche publishers. Half a brand’s AI citations typically come from just 20 outlets, and those outlets vary sharply by brand, even within a category. Visibility is now a rapid precision target game, as citation velocity peaks in the first seven days after publication then just as quickly falls away. Third, AI has changed when stories matter. Monthly chatbot visits now sit over 7 billion globally, approaching 10% of traditional search traffic. This means that AI writes the first draft of your crisis narrative and your first sales call, using whatever operational stories, filings or activist content it can find. Being ahead of the story is now more paramount, and challenging, than ever. In this always-on-gorge-everything world, chief storytellers can do three things that AI cannot: they can build a coherent explanation of who the organisation is and ensure it survives contact with sceptics; they can translate operations into “reputation infrastructure” (safety, governance, customer outcomes and proof points) that humans and engines can interrogate and trust; and they can strategically orchestrate story distribution across journalists, Linkedin, Reddit, press wires and owned content so that generative AI accurately treats the organisation as a trusted source, not a blind spot. Ultimately, in an age optimised for competence, connection is the real premium, and those of us who can communicate, build trust and manage complexity across multiple constituencies will be hardest to automate. In other words, professional storytellers aren’t on the fringes of the AI story; they’re one of the few groups the future is actively tilting towards. However, with advertising now taking a foothold within generative AI, traditional earned PR and marketing folk are soon going to be rubbing elbows within the same generative environments. It’s time to make nice with our marketing colleagues, or at the very least learn from and emulate them. We cannot afford to be allergic to funnels, attribution or media economics. In a world of AI slop, storytelling may be the only thing that makes you stand above the crowd. Today’s chief storyteller must understand how stories travel and how the media business around those stories now works, paying heed to five skills in particular. Earned visibility through Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) Influence brand visibility inside generative AI through earned channels. This demands a precise, high-cadence earned programme aimed at the specific journalists, wires and platforms that AI trusts for your category. Narrative architecture and explanation design AI is optimised for explanation, framing and recommendation, not just discovery. Design “explanation layers”: clear, consistent narratives about what you do, who you serve and why you’re credible that hold up across thousands of prompts. Operational fluency and reputation infrastructure Get close to the business. Winning storytellers understand supply chains, product, compliance and safety deeply enough to turn them into stories about traceability, resilience and outcomes, ensuring those stories are documented and structured so AI has something solid to work with. Cross-disciplinary marketing literacy As generative AI compresses discovery, consideration and purchase into a single interface, communicators need to also be able to speak marketing. Marcoms in its truest AI-led sense has arrived. Know how retail media, performance, loyalty and brand safety behave when the “storefront” is a chatbot and align with marketing so that paid, owned and earned stories line up inside AI environments. Critical thinking and sniffing out the BS AI is prolific, not wise. The tech companies leading the charge on communications investment do so because they value storytellers as “BS detectors” who can spot cliché, bias and over-claim and design more tactile, grounded storytelling. This requires classic why, what, how storytelling that is sharpened with data: structured thinking, skepticism and the willingness to kill a neat story that isn’t actually true. AI won’t take the job of a great communicator any time soon. It will, however, make good storytelling the scarce resource that talent, capital and algorithms are all competing to capture. Good luck to all the current and future storytellers out there. This story first appeared in Mumbrella’s opinion section on 3 March, 2026

Just before Christmas, Arun Sudhaman wrote " Spectres at the Feast ," unpacking Sir Martin Sorrell's BBC Today programme commentary that "there's no such thing as PR anymore." Sudhaman's diagnosis cut deeper than Sorrell's provocation: the real problem isn't whether PR is dead, but whether the industry can reclaim authorship of its own mandate while better-resourced marketing players claim "scaled, digital storytelling" as their territory. If you work in communications, this should have landed with more of a thud than the usual industry chatter. The strategic high ground of earned storytelling, surely the very thing PR was built to own, is being contested while we're still explaining what we do. Rather than fuel the "dead or alive" argument, I've decided to treat this moment as a prompt. After 25+ years watching this industry evolve from "press release and prayer" (there is truth in this) to something far more sophisticated and multifaceted (which you and I both know it is), I keep returning to a simple future looking question: how do we build earned credibility that survives in a world where machines increasingly do the summarising? Seeking inspiration over Christmas, I re-read Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life (2018) , which argues for choosing order over chaos by starting with what you can control. Six of his rules struck me as unexpectedly helpful signposts for communications in response to this question. 1) Stand up straight with your shoulders back PR has a habit of underselling itself, then wondering why it gets treated as a cost centre. If we want a seat at the table, we need to show up like we belong there. That means describing our work in terms that matter to the business: risk reduced, regulatory heat lowered, reputation enhanced, customer confidence sustained, purchase decisions accelerated. The final outcome is especially salient. As the AI search era gathers pace, earned credibility is a commercial driver. Recent research from Onclusive found that brands with highly positive earned media sentiment are three times more likely to win in head-to-head commercial comparisons. When your organisation is being described by AI answer engines using other people's words, the quality of those third-party words matters more than ever. Show your stakeholders what your organisation's ChatGPT profile looks like versus your competitor's. That gap becomes your business case. 2) Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world This rule is painfully practical. Before complaining about Sorrell's barbs, let's fix the basics. Most organisations still have trust gaps hiding in plain sight: dated FAQs, vague positioning, thin "about" pages, leadership profiles that say nothing, verbose thought leadership that says even less. Getting your house in order - namely your own content - isn't just good brand housekeeping. It's the very foundation that feeds the machines. Generative engines reward clarity, consistency, and credible sources. If you want to show up well in AI-mediated discovery, make your backyard legible: A well-structured website explaining what you do, who you serve, and what proof you have FAQs answering real stakeholder questions, not the ones you wish they asked Clear, quotable narratives for leaders, with verifiable supporting facts Useful, authoritative content that earns its place rather than fills space Research from my UK based partner Hard Numbers shows that large language models source information from a blend of editorial media, owned content, and other high-authority online sources. This makes Gen AI a force multiplier for existing content efforts. It's not glamorous, but it's compound interest. 3) Tell the truth, or at least don't lie Trust is significantly undervalued in today's climate, which makes it worth the investment. In an AI-shaped information environment, credibility is currency and contradictions are tax. Applied habits of yesteryear - massaging reality, spinning weak stories, hiding behind euphemisms - don't just look bad anymore. They're expensive own goals. The strongest communications teams aren't the ones who "win the narrative." They're the ones who help organisations behave in ways that can be defended, explained, and repeated without regret to both human and machine stakeholders, all the while building trust. Simple test: would we be comfortable seeing a questionable claim quoted back to us on a chatbot, out of context, in six months? If not, tighten it or drop it. 4) Be precise in your speech Vagueness can be the more comfortable path, but precision is about being understood. It's the difference between "we are committed to innovation" and "here's what we changed, why we changed it, and how we measure whether it worked." In generative search, precision is also how you become citeable. If AI systems increasingly act as the first filter between stakeholders and your brand, then "machine-readable credibility" becomes part of the job. Fewer fluffy adjectives, more concrete proof points, more conversational straight talk that can survive repetition across sources. The goal isn't volume. The goal is reliable information that scales. 5) Make friends with people who want the best for you Earned has always been a team sport. In the old world, this meant fostering relationships with journalists, editors, and producers. That still matters, but the stakeholder circle has widened. Today your credibility is shaped by analysts, academics, creators, industry advocates, government, NGOs, employees, customers, traditional media, and niche communities. The modern earned play is less "spray and pray" and more "build a citation-rich ecosystem." You want credible third parties saying consistent, positive things about you for reasons that stand up to scrutiny. Internally, the same rule applies. If PR wants to lead in the AI search era, it can't sit downstream of decisions. Build allies across product, legal, customer, HR, risk, and the C-suite, not to ask permission, but to shape reality before it hits the headlines or the model. 6) Do not bother children when they are skateboarding If PR is to evolve, we must protect experimentation. Marketing figured this out with the 70:20:10 rule. As Rory Sutherland notes , you need the 10% of honeybees following random routes to find new pollen when the old supply dries up. Communications has been too risk-averse to adopt this discipline. We need to fix that. Most communications teams I know run flat out just to keep up with the cycle of work coming their way, which means change happens only after something breaks. That's a rough way to live. Fortune favours the bold. Ringfence time for structured tests in AI search optimisation, not gimmicks or prompt hacks, but real experiments that teach you what gets remembered and repeated: Which thought leadership formats earn citations, not just clicks Which proof points travel through third-party sources Which questions stakeholders actually ask AI tools about your category Which owned assets improve clarity and reduce confusion Small falls are the price of progress. Better to have them in controlled pilots than in crises. Reclaiming the Mandate Can the PR sector reclaim authorship of its mandate, demonstrating that its counsel and capabilities are indispensable? That's the right question for 2026, but it requires us to stop asking for permission and start demonstrating competence. The "press release and a prayer" version of PR is mercifully long gone. The discipline that's emerged - earning trust, building understanding, architecting reputation in an age of algorithmic mediation - is more valuable and measurable than ever. But as the AI search era gathers pace, the strategic high ground of earned storytelling is not ours by default. We have to take it. This article first appeared on Earned First on 20 January 2026.

Well, this is disheartening. According to the PRCA's 2025 census , more than one in three PR professionals (37%) still rely on Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) as a performance metric. For those outside the industry: AVE multiplies earned coverage (column centimetres or broadcast seconds) by advertising rate card prices, usually with a 3x multiplier to reflect editorial credibility. Traditional media pitching is still important, but back when coverage outcomes dominated communications goals, the AVE method always held appeal when showing a dollar figure mattered most – and perhaps this resurgence reflects our bottom-line-obsessed times. But I find it short-sighted. When attention today is earned through respected influencer perspectives, and brand visibility demands influence within generative AI search results that drives actual business value, shouldn't we have the courage to adopt measurement approaches based on reputation and business outcomes – real impact that transcends impressions and likes? When I was at Edelman, we championed the 3 A's of measurement (A³): Awareness, Advocacy, and Action. Clients loved the thinking, though budget rarely matched ambition. I've long envied marketing's deeper pockets and appreciation for brand science that definitively proves campaign ROI. As we approach 2026 – with earned storytelling leading the charge in training machine learning models – we should be reaching beyond outdated vanity metrics to demonstrate communications' true value. Am I wrong?