Why Comms Pros Are the New Visibility Engineers

TL;DR

• Google rankings don’t guarantee AI visibility—brands dominating search are disappearing from generative answers.

• 95% of AI citations come from non-paid sources; 27% are from journalism (Muck Rack, July 2025).

• Recency rules: OpenAI models heavily favor content published in the last 12 months.

• Citations don’t just support AI answers—they change them.

• Visibility engineers act as architects, electricians, debuggers, analysts, security guards, and AI optimizers.

• Your existing comms skills still apply—storytelling, media relations, thought leadership—just reframed for an AI-first environment.

• The PESO Model© is your visibility engine, feeding AI with consistent, credible, multi-channel signals.

• AI brand summary accuracy, citation velocity, domain authority of citing sources, misinformation risk, and more are your new KPIs.

The New Visibility Engineer

You didn’t go to school for engineering. You studied journalism. Or marketing. Or communications. Or, if you’re like me, English and math (weird combo, I know). 

You mastered storytelling, messaging, strategy, maybe even media training for executives who refuse to stick to the talking points.

But here you are—optimizing inputs, debugging brand visibility issues, and working across interconnected systems that require precision, structure, and adaptability.

Welcome to your new title: Visibility Engineer.

It’s not a title you’ll find on LinkedIn (yet), but it perfectly captures what modern comms pros do. 

You’re not just generating buzz. You’re building the infrastructure that determines whether your brand shows up when—and how—people ask AI-powered engines for answers.

Because, as the entire industry has been discussing for weeks on end, that’s how discovery works now.

Your buyers aren’t browsing your blog. They’re asking ChatGPT, “Who’s the best solution for [insert your category]?”

Journalists aren’t combing news release wires. They’re prompting Claude to summarize key players in your space.

Analysts and board members? They’re running due diligence with Gemini and Perplexity before ever hitting your website.

And what shows up?

That depends entirely on what’s already been published, linked, cited, and structured in a way that machines can understand.

So no, you didn’t sign up for this job, but congratulations! You’re already doing it!

You’re already the one making sure your brand is findable, trustworthy, and “citation-worthy” in an AI-shaped world. You just need the strategy—and maybe a hard hat—to match.

The Window Is Already Closing

For a while, it was easy to ignore AI. It was interesting, sure—but not urgent. Your brand still ranked in Google. You still had journalist relationships. People still clicked things. You could squint and pretend that not much had changed.

Well, those days are over. The visibility rules have been rewritten—and the algorithms didn’t send a memo.

If your brand was optimized for search, that’s no longer enough. If your PR strategy is centered on media hits, you’re only halfway there. If your content is structured for human readers but not machines? Good luck showing up in a zero-click world.

AI Is the New Front Door

According to a July 2025 Muck Rack study analyzing more than a million citations from AI-generated responses, 95% of links cited by AI are from non-paid sources, and 27% are from journalistic content. 

And when you disable citations altogether? The entire AI response changes. That’s how much influence sources have on what these tools say.

These systems aren’t just quoting your media coverage. They’re learning from it. They’re making judgments—about your brand, your credibility, your relevance—based on what’s been published, when it was published, and by whom. And they’re doing it before a customer clicks anything.

Often, instead of clicking on anything.

The Brand That Disappeared

Let’s say you’re an enterprise software company in data integration. You’ve been around for a decade, rank well in Google, and have a few Gartner mentions under your belt.

But when a prospect types into ChatGPT, “Who are the top data integration platforms for enterprises?”—you’re nowhere to be found.

Instead, AI lists competitors like Fivetran, Airbyte, and Matillion. Why? Because they’ve been cited recently in TechCrunch, used consistent language across their owned media, and appeared in open web sources that generative AI models read.

Meanwhile, your most recent coverage is 18 months old and buried in paywalled analyst PDFs. The blog hasn’t been updated in a year. 

You’re optimized for Google, not GPT. So when a decision-maker asks AI for a shortlist, you’re not even on it.

Visibility isn’t lost in a single moment. It erodes in silence—until you’re not in the answer one day.

The AI wave isn’t coming. It’s already here. And it’s reshaping how people find, trust, and choose brands.

That’s why communicators can’t just react anymore. You need to engineer visibility on purpose—before someone else builds the system without you.

The New Discovery Landscape

Let’s strip away the theory and look at what’s happening behind the curtain.

The MuckRack study I mentioned earlier analyzed more than one million links cited by major AI tools—including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—to understand what’s shaping the answers these systems generate. 

The findings are a wake-up call for every brand trying to stay visible in a world where clicks are optional and summaries are the final destination.

The big stat is that 95% of links cited by AI are from non-paid sources. That means nearly all the content AI leans on to answer questions comes from earned, owned, or publicly available information. 

And of those links, 27% are from newsrooms. They’re not just reporting stories—they’re shaping AI’s worldview. 

If your brand appears in media outlets, you’ve just placed a breadcrumb in the discovery trail. If you don’t? You’re a blank space.

But it’s not just what is cited—it’s when. AI models, particularly OpenAI’s, show a strong bias toward recency. Content published within the last year is significantly more likely to surface in responses, especially for timely or opinion-based queries. 

This means that old coverage—even if it was a media relations home run at the time—has a short shelf life in the age of AI.

Even more fascinating: citations don’t just decorate AI responses—they shape them. When researchers toggled off the ability to cite sources, the models produced entirely different answers. 

In other words, changing the source material changes the narrative. 

And the kind of question asked? That matters too. 

The study found that advice-seeking or opinion-based prompts tended to pull in more dynamic sources like corporate blogs, recent news, or thought leadership pieces. Encyclopedic or fact-based prompts, on the other hand, relied more heavily on older, static content. 

So, if your brand isn’t regularly contributing to both the timely and the timeless, you’re missing out on half the conversation.

Finally, while domain authority still plays a role, it isn’t universal. 

ChatGPT might love Reuters, but Claude barely touches it. In healthcare, government and academic sources rise to the top. In hospitality, owned media is cited more than journalism. 

Each industry has its own trust ecosystem, and AI models learn from different slices of it. That’s why visibility engineering isn’t a one-size-fits-all discipline—it’s a custom build.

Bottom line? 

If you’re not actively feeding the system with relevant, credible, recent content, you’re not just at risk of falling behind—you’ve already disappeared. 

This means that, as communicators, your role in earned and owned media has become even more important. Owned media has always been the foundation of the PESO Model©, which feeds earned media. Lean more heavily into those two things while using paid and shared for distribution and reaching new audiences.

What a Visibility Engineer Actually Does

It’s one thing to adopt a new title. It’s another thing to know what it actually means.

A visibility engineer is a communications strategist who builds the systems that ensure a brand is seen, trusted, cited, and surfaced in an AI-driven world. 

And that work? It’s a lot closer to engineering than you might think.

You’re no longer just a storyteller. You’re an architect. You map how content flows across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels. You plan for discoverability, not just distribution. You build the infrastructure that makes visibility scalable and sustainable—not just a lucky outcome when a campaign lands.

You’re an electrician, too. You wire the system—connecting channels, applying structured data, optimizing for schema, and embedding metadata. You make sure that when a bot scrapes your site or summarizes your news release, it gets the right story, with the proper context, from the right source.

And when something breaks? You’re the debugger. You investigate why ChatGPT is hallucinating your product features or why Claude describes your company as if it’s 2021. You trace the faulty signal to a stale blog post, a missing citation, or an outdated third-party mention. Then you fix it.

You’re also the data analyst. You monitor brand visibility like a system administrator monitors uptime. You track not just mentions, but citations. You identify where you appear, how frequently, and in what context, and then compare that to your competitors. 

Is your owned media being pulled into generative engines? Are you showing up in the right verticals? Are the descriptions accurate, up to date, and favorably framed?

And—this part’s less glamorous—you’re the security guard. You scan for misinformation, impersonation, and brand risk. You know how fast a fabricated summary or bad AI answer can spread, and you have protocols in place to correct the record, reinforce the facts, and re-seed accurate sources. You don’t just respond to crises. You engineer resilience.

Finally, and perhaps most critically, you’re an AI optimizer. You understand that not all citations are created equal—and that some matter more than others, depending on the model and the industry. 

You intentionally feed the system with high-authority sources: timely earned media, structured owned media, and credible third-party validation. You make your brand easy to cite, hard to ignore, and impossible to hallucinate away.

This isn’t a hypothetical shift. It’s already happening. Communicators who embrace it aren’t just increasing reach—they’re designing relevance.

Translating Existing Skills to the Role

Let’s get one thing straight: you don’t need to learn to code to be a visibility engineer.

This isn’t about becoming a technical SEO wizard or suddenly understanding Python. It’s about reframing the skills you already have—the ones you’ve honed through years of messaging, media relations, and brand storytelling—and applying them to a new system.

You’ve done this before. It’s just a reframing of what you do to take advantage of our endless opportunities.

Storytelling becomes a structured narrative

You already know how to craft a compelling brand message. Now, you’re shaping that story for multiple audiences—humans, of course, but also AI. That means clarity, consistency, and context. It means building owned media that’s citation-worthy and machine-readable. Same story. Smarter structure.

Media relations becomes an authority ecosystem

Pitching reporters? Still important. But now you’re also considering which outlets AI trusts most—and which ones are suing the AI companies for copyright infringement. 

The list of those outlets changes constantly, but as of this writing, News Corp, The Washington Post, and The Guardian are all crawled by OpenAI. Google has signed a deal for Associated Press to deliver its content via Gemini, and Meta has done similarly with Reuters. 

Any publisher that uses CloudFlare can opt in or out. Those outlets include TIME, Condé Nast, Sky News, Quora, The Atlantic, Fortune, and BuzzFeed. 

These don’t cover trade or local pubs, which AI also uses for citations and should absolutely be on your media list.

You want coverage in places that show up in generative answers. You’re not chasing clips. You’re seeding influence.

Thought leadership becomes source priming

That bylined article? It’s not just positioning your exec as a subject matter expert—it’s also training the model. 

The newsletter you publish on LinkedIn, Medium, or Substack? Also training the model.

Your owned media published and distributed consistently and effectively? Yep, that, too!

When published in the right places, your thought leadership also becomes part of the citation network AI uses to summarize your brand’s credibility. 

A well-placed opinion piece does double duty.

SEO becomes GEO

You’ve optimized for Google. Now you’re optimizing for GPT. This means thinking beyond keywords—into prompts, structure, and context. 

You already do this if you use the PESO Model framework. Your content answers your audience’s questions. And because humans and AI use questions to find content, you’ll show up in the answers.

It’s about creating content that LLMs want to pull into responses, and ensuring they attribute it correctly when they do.

Issues management becomes AI misinformation control

You’ve already handled crises. You’ve corrected the record when the media got it wrong. The threat comes from machines trained on incomplete or inaccurate data. 

The fix? 

Same principles, new channels. You monitor, you respond, you re-seed the truth.

You don’t need to reinvent your career to keep up. You just need to recode your instincts for a new environment. 

The work you’ve been doing all along? It still matters. Now it matters in machine-readable, algorithmically amplified, and strategically unavoidable ways.

How PESO Powers AI Visibility

For years, the PESO Model has helped communications teams integrate their work across paid, earned, shared, and owned media. It has broken down silos, aligned teams, and proved that PR can drive measurable business results.

But today, PESO isn’t just a framework. It’s your visibility engine.

If AI is the new gatekeeper to discover, PESO is how you get past it. Because each media type contributes a different visibility signal. And together, they create the kind of multi-sourced, high-authority content ecosystem that teaches AI what your brand is, what it does, and why it matters.

Paid media fuels the system

It’s not just about reach anymore—it’s about reinforcement. 

Strategic paid placements can amplify earned media, accelerate exposure of citation-worthy content, and even help drive the kinds of backlinks that increase domain authority, which are both still important in traditional search.  

Paid doesn’t earn trust on its own, but it turns up the volume on what already works.

Earned media builds trust and feeds the AI machine

This is the crown jewel. According to the MuckRack survey, 27% of AI citations come from journalistic content.

Media mentions aren’t just great optics—they’re training data. Earned media is how your brand earns a seat at the AI table. And earned media that cites your brand next to your priority keywords? That’s winning at an entirely different level. 

Shared media signals relevance

Every like, repost, and retweet is a trust signal. 

When your content circulates via influential accounts, especially those that AI models also “read” (like subject matter experts or journalists on LinkedIn), you’re not just engaging your audience.

You’re reinforcing brand legitimacy to boost your discoverability across platforms and algorithms.

Owned media anchors the narrative

Your blog, newsroom, and website remain critical—but only if they’re structured and up to date. AI needs clear, citation-ready information. 

That means recent publishing dates, consistent messaging, and content that aligns with what third parties are saying. 

When done right, owned media becomes the single source of truth for both humans and machines.

PESO is no longer just an integration model. It’s the scaffolding that supports your brand’s presence across search, summaries, snippets, and smart assistants.

It’s how you engineer visibility—not just chase it.

Metrics That Matter in the AI Era

You’re missing the story if you’re still reporting on impressions, AVEs, and click-through rates.

In the AI era, brand visibility isn’t just about how many people saw your message. It’s about whether your message was cited, trusted, and resurfaced by the machines shaping discovery.

Traditional metrics only tell part of the story. They don’t measure whether your earned media made it into the LLM training data. They can’t tell you if your brand appears in generative search results when a prospect asks, “Who are the top companies in [category]?”

It’s time for a new scorecard.

Start with strategic questions: 

• What does AI say about our brand today?
• Are we cited in the kinds of sources AI actually pulls from?
• Is our most recent media coverage being summarized—or skipped?
• Are we more discoverable than our competitors in zero-click search?

Then you can get tactical. As a visibility engineer, the new KPIs that matter include:

• AI Brand Summary Accuracy: Use prompt testing tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Claude with standard prompts (e.g., “What is [Your Brand]?”, “Top companies in [category]”, “What are the strengths of [Your Brand]?”). Record results monthly in a spreadsheet or dashboard to watch shifts over time.
• Citation Velocity: Set up alerts using Brand24, BuzzSumo, or Muck Rack’s new Generative Pulse to monitor how quickly new content appears in summaries or zero-click environments. Track “time to appear” from publication date to date cited in AI outputs.
• Structured Content Indexability: Use tools like Screaming Frog or Schema.org validator to audit structured data and identify crawl issues. Check your blog/newsroom with LLM prompt tests to see what it’s actually pulling.
• Misinformation Risk: Set up routine brand audits across multiple AI tools. Document hallucinations and backtrack their origin by prompting, “Where did you get that information?” or checking citations.

Tracking this data turns visibility from a fuzzy hope into a strategic advantage—one you can measure, refine, and scale. Which brings us to the bigger point: this isn’t just about new metrics. It’s about embracing a fundamentally different role.

Embrace the Title, Own the System

You’ve already been doing the work. Now it’s time to own the role.

You are not “just” a communicator. You’re not a news release machine, a media whisperer, a PPT deck creator, or someone who gets brought in after the strategy is baked. 

You are a Visibility Engineer, and your work is shaping how the world discovers, understands, and trusts your brand.

The systems have changed. Discovery is no longer linear. Attention is no longer earned through volume. And visibility? It’s no longer a passive result.

It’s something you design on purpose.

AI is here. The models are watching. And every media hit, every blog post, every podcast episode, every newsletter, every video, and every piece of structured content is now a training data decision.

So what now?

A Day in the Life of a Visibility Engineer

So what does this actually look like in practice?

Here’s a sample week for a visibility engineer inside a mid-sized B2B brand:

• Monday: Review generative search results for your brand using prompts like, “What is [Brand] known for?” and “Who are the leaders in [category]?” Document changes from the previous month.
• Tuesday: Collaborate with your content team to identify blog topics matching audience search intent and citation potential. Review structured data on the site and update publishing schema where needed.
• Wednesday: Pitch earned media to AI-crawled publications, trade journals, and local pubs known to appear in your industry’s AI responses.
• Thursday: Review social and shared content to identify which pieces resonate with influencers and credible resharing accounts. Plan distribution boosts for anything citation-worthy.
• Friday: Meet with leadership to report on visibility metrics. Show which competitors are gaining ground in AI-generated outputs—and why. Use this intel to prioritize next week’s PESO efforts.

This isn’t a new full-time role. It’s a lens through which your existing comms work becomes more strategic, measurable, and future-proof.

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