TL;DR

Twice in my career, communicators have been handed work that should have been ours. With SEO, someone else raised their hand first. After 2020, our seat was tied to a moment rather than the business, so it disappeared when that moment did. Now AI models are deciding which brands people trust, and they learn mostly from earned and owned media—which is exactly what we do. Only 3% of PR pros say PR owns AI visibility, so the seat is empty. Claiming it in 2027 planning takes courage, plus a team that can do the work, a plan to point to, and a baseline that shows whether you’re absent, mentioned, cited, or featured.

Key Insights

• Expertise doesn’t win the job. Raising your hand does. That’s how PR lost SEO.
• A seat tied to a moment is a seat on loan. Comms’ 2020 seat went away when the moment became a liability.
• AI models learn mostly from earned and owned media, and the AI engines rarely return the same answers, so you can’t buy or game your way in.
• Only 3% of PR pros say PR owns AI visibility. 2027 planning is when someone fills that seat.
• Most comms teams are coordinated, not integrated, and measure activities instead of outcomes—the exact gaps that would hand AI visibility to another team.
• Measure AI visibility on a ladder (absent, mentioned, cited, featured), set a Q1 baseline, and tie every goal to the business, not the comms department.

PR Fumbled SEO. Don’t Fumble AI Visibility.

Twice in my career, communicators have been handed something that should have been ours.

And twice we let it go.

The first time was SEO. The second was 2020, when every brand on earth suddenly needed help talking about its values. 

Both times, the work landed squarely in our wheelhouse. Both times, we ended up on the outside looking in.

Now we’re being handed it a third time with AI visibility, and it might be the biggest of the three—and I’ll be damned if we let someone else run away with it!

A couple of weeks ago, Greg Abel and I co-hosted a fireside chat for the PRSA Maryland Chesapeake chapter. He asked me how comms pros can get a seat at the table, and I said, “Bruh, you’re pushing my buttons right now!”

We absolutely deserve a seat at the table. We shouldn’t have to fight for it. But we (the industry we) tend to give away every opportunity for the type of leadership that would get us invited without having to fight for it.

We’ve done it twice already. Let me show you what I mean, starting with the first time we gave it away.

The First Time: SEO

Remember when getting to page one of Google was the holy grail?

What did it take? Great content and earned backlinks. Which is to say: writing things people want to read and earning our way into having credible third parties point to them.

That’s PR. That has always been PR.

But the digital marketers and SEO specialists raised their hands first. They learned the vocabulary, built the dashboards, and walked into the CMO’s office with a plan. 

Meanwhile, most of us were still sending clip books and telling ourselves link building was “a marketing thing.”

So it became their job. And for the next decade, PR pros watched SEO agencies pitch “digital PR” back to our own clients.

I’m still annoyed about that. As someone who is pitched hundreds of times every week, I can tell you it’s not done well. And yet…

The lesson here is that expertise doesn’t win the job. Raising your hand does.

Keep that in mind. We’re going to return to it in a moment.

The Second Time: 2020

Then came 2020. I’m sure you remember 2020. It’s not one that will easily leave our memories.

Not only did we have a pandemic (as if that weren’t enough), we had an election and a social justice reckoning that had every CEO on earth scrambling to figure out how to communicate their organization’s values.

They put out statements. They pledged to increase DE&I efforts. They built purpose pages on their websites. They made commitments to their employees. Employee comms ran around the clock.

The comms industry was at the center of it all. For a minute there, we had a real seat at the table—and CEOs were calling us before they called anyone else.

A few years later, most of those efforts have been quietly scaled back, and comms lost the seat it had earned.

I think we all know why. And I’m not going to fall on our sword on this one. It’s not our fault those efforts were scaled back. Between lawsuits, activist campaigns, and executive orders, pulling back became the move for any organization that wanted to protect its profits.

But here’s the part I will own: our seat was tied to the moment, not to the business. We were invited in because there was a crisis, not because leadership could see the results our work had on revenue, retention, or reputation. 

So when the moment became a liability, the seat went with it.

The lesson here is that a seat tied to a moment is a seat on loan.

The Third Chance: AI

Which brings us to today.

We know that the AI models deciding which brands people trust learn mostly from earned and owned media. Media coverage. Expert commentary. Third-party validation. Your website. The content you publish.

That’s our expertise, full stop.

And the proof keeps piling up:

• AI engines are three times more likely to cite premium publisher content than brand-owned content. Earned media isn’t a nice-to-have in AI search. It’s the main course.
• When we audited a client’s AI visibility, the only content consistently cited was their own original research. Not the product pages. Not the news releases. The research.
• Orbit Media found just 1.7% overlap among the AI answer engines. Meaning, less than 2% of the time, they return the same answers. This means you cannot buy or game your way in. You have to earn it.

So here’s the kicker. According to research from D S Simon and Sword and the Script, only 3% of PR pros say PR owns AI visibility.

Three percent.

The seat isn’t just open. It’s empty. Nobody’s even sitting near it…and it’s ours for the taking!

Why We Could Lose It Again

Let’s take a look at the pattern from the first two we discussed. Either someone else raised their hand first, or our seat was tied to a moment rather than the business, and we were unable to demonstrate success in a way that made sense to the business.

Both of those things are happening again. Right now.

Here’s what we see through our client work, and via the data from the PESO Model Diagnostic®. 

• Teams think they’re integrated. They’re not. They’re coordinated, but they’re not integrated. They’re not the same thing.
• Almost everyone measures activities, not outcomes. Even at the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies, the comms teams measure activities. 
• Almost everyone is scared of measurement. Math! Ack! Scary!
• Almost everyone rates their work higher on the maturity ladder than it deserves.

That list right there? It’s a recipe for losing AI visibility to another team.

Later in the PRSA chat I mentioned earlier, Greg brought up something he heard Fred Cook say about earning a seat at the table—and I can’t stop thinking about it. 

The gist is that communicators need courage. We need the courage to stand up and say “this is ours”—and then go out and deliver the results to back it up.

Both halves matter. Expertise without courage is how we lost SEO. Courage without results tied to the business is how we lost our seat after 2020.

Let’s not lose AI visibility, too. 

Now is the time. We’re planning for next year. We’re looking at results from this year. If we don’t include AI visibility in our plans—and what we’re going to do about it—someone else will. It might be marketing, IT, or a shiny new “GEO” agency. It’ll be whoever gets to the CMO first with a deck.

This is not a fight between marketing and comms. We need both. The PESO Model® was built for both. But if the LLMs learn from owned and earned media, it’s simply ours for the taking. 

How to Say “This Is Ours” in 2027 Planning

Making the case takes more than courage. Walk into a planning meeting with nothing but conviction, and you’ll get a polite nod and a line item that says “PR—same as last year.”

You need three things to begin to take ownership of this.

1. A Team That Knows How to Do the Work

Not “we do media relations.” That’s what everyone says, and it’s not going to cut it.

Can your team build an anchor hub? Run an audit across four AI tools and explain what the results mean? Turn an executive’s thinking into earned media that AI actually picks up? 

If the honest answer is “sort of,” that’s fine. But be clear about it and what you need to do to say yes. 

2. A Plan to Point To

Here’s what goes in the 2027 plan:

• An AI visibility baseline in Q1, so you know where you’re starting
• Original research (the thing AI cites most)
• A thought leadership program, so your executives are the people AI quotes
• A media list built on what AI actually cites, not on who you’ve always pitched
• Three to five anchor hubs on your website
• A quarterly review to see what moved

As you do that work, you’ll start to remove impressions, AVEs, and vanity metrics that don’t prove anything except that you’re busy.  

3. The Numbers to Justify a Bigger Investment

And then you need to measure AI visibility with four things in mind: are we absent in the AI answers? Are we mentioned? Are we cited? Or are we featured? 

That’s what your baseline will look like—absent, mentioned, cited, or featured? And you’ll use that to help you climb up the ladder.

For instance, we recently discovered that when the AI assistants are asked about marketing or comms certifications or courses, we do not come up. Not at all. Kind of a problem, right?

So our baseline for that particular side of the business is that we’re absent. The goal in Q1 is to work our way up to being mentioned. Then we’ll focus Q2 on being cited. Q3 will focus on getting featured in at least two of the systems. And by this time next year, we should come up all the time alongside PRSA, AMA, HubSpot, and Google.

This is how you make sure your seat outlasts the moment.

To create your baseline, ask, “Where is our brand today for the questions our buyers actually ask, and where will it be by the end of next year?” 

Pair that with first-party measurement (traffic, leads, and pipeline you can trace) and goals tied to the business, not to the comms department.

Then ask “says who?” of every metric on your slide. If you can’t answer it, your CFO will ask it for you. 

Here’s a prompt to get you started. Paste in your 2026 results and your 2027 goals, then ask:

Using the results and goals above, draft a one-page business case for the communications team owning AI visibility in 2027. Include the investment required, the outcomes we’ll commit to, and how we’ll measure them each quarter. Then flag every claim in the business case that isn’t backed by evidence in what I’ve shared, and list the five objections our CFO is most likely to raise, with a suggested answer for each.

The flagged claims are your homework. The objections are your dress rehearsal.

So, About That Seat at the Table

Back to Greg’s question: how do comms pros get a seat at the table?

We stop giving it away.

We raise our hands before someone else does. We build the measurement before the work starts, not after leadership asks what it moved. And we show up to 2027 planning with a plan, not a feeling.

That last part is where I see the best teams stumble. They have the talent. They have the courage. They walk in, say “this is ours,” and mean it. Then the first quarterly review rolls around, and all they have is a slide full of activities. 

Without a baseline, every win looks like an anecdote—and anecdotes are the first thing cut when budgets tighten.

That’s what we’re helping teams with right now, via internal training, 2027 planning, or measurement design. If you’re heading into planning thinking “this should be ours” but without the plan or the numbers to back it up, shoot me a note. I’d love to help!

We’ve been handed the keys twice and twice we’ve given them back.

Not this time, bruh.

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