PR Services

AI Visibility: How PR Shapes the Story AI Tells About Your Brand

AI engines are becoming the gatekeepers of your brand’s narrative. We make sure the story they tell about you is the one you want told.

Audit Your AI Narrative

Influencing AI Visibility means going from being found to being understood.

Control how AI engines represent your company, your products and your executives. We leverage earned media—the content source AI engines trust most—to build, shape and evolve the narrative that AI tells about your brand.

AI Is Telling Your Story, Whether You Like It or Not

The question isn’t whether AI is shaping your brand’s story. (It is.)

The question is whether you’re influencing it.

When a prospect, investor, journalist or partner asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or others about your company, they get an answer. That answer isn’t a list of links to sort through. It’s a fully formed narrative of who you are, what you do and why you matter.

In the eyes of AI, PR and marketing efforts are no longer disconnected.

In the past, individual marketing efforts and PR stories could float around disparately without a consumer ever seeing how they all come together to paint a bigger picture of a brand. A press release lived in one place, a byline in another, a product review somewhere else. No single audience member was synthesizing all of it.

Now, that’s changed.

AI is creating big-picture narratives that are available to users on demand.

AI engines are seeing all of those pieces very clearly and quickly. And it’s using them to shape authoritative assessments of companies and brands that are available to users on demand. On top of that, this narrative is constantly evolving with each new data point that the company, or a third party, puts out about the company. This has never existed, until now.

You might recall around the end of 2016, when seemingly overnight, the business media went from never having talked about artificial intelligence in business to ubiquitous coverage of its applications in marketing. Behind this was New York City-based PR and Communications agency Channel V Media.

A narrative-driven approach takes you from being found to being understood.

We’ve been shaping narratives since 2008, and working at the intersection of PR and AI for over a decade. In 2016, Channel V Media helped take AI mainstream in the media when we broke one of the first AI companies into major media outlets. Forbes later credited our firm with taking AI mainstream.

But what’s happening now is different. AI isn’t just something we promote for our clients. It’s become the lens through which audiences discover, evaluate and form opinions about every company.

Decision-makers are doing more self-led discovery than targeted discovery.

Search engines are being replaced by answer engines. Instead of clicking through Google results, they’re asking AI a question and getting a direct answer. That answer is assembled from every signal you and others put into the market.

This means that narrative-driven PR strategies now have a second, compounding effect. They don’t just reach humans, they feed the AI engines that shape how millions of people learn about companies from that point forward.

The Evidence

PR Is the Most Powerful Lever for Shaping AI Narratives

<2 weeks

From Press Hit to AI Citation

Earned media placements were cited by AI engines in under two weeks, reinforcing that PR doesn’t just reach human audiences, it rewrites the AI narrative in near real-time.
CVM Client Data

86%

Narrative Alignment Across AI Engines

After a targeted PR campaign, 86% of the narrative across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini aligned with the client’s intended positioning. In the process, it replaced fragmented, outdated descriptions.
CVM Client Data

43%

Of AI Narratives Come From Earned Media

Traditional and trade media coverage is the single largest input AI engines use when constructing brand narratives. They’re weighted more heavily than owned content, reviews and analyst reports combined.
CVM / AI Engine Analysis

75%

Of AI Inputs Are PR-Influenced

When you account for earned coverage, press releases, thought leadership and the data reports PR generates, three-quarters of what AI engines draw from traces back to PR activity.
CVM / AI Engine Analysis

52%

Of Marketers Say PR Shapes Their AI Presence

More than half of marketers already recognize that PR directly influences how AI engines present their companies. This number will only rise as AI-driven discovery replaces traditional search.
Tapping Into the Attention Economy, CVM

5x

Compounding Narrative Reach

A single earned media placement now reaches human readers and feeds five major AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot) simultaneously. This multiplies the narrative impact of every story.
CVM / AI Discoverability practice

How We Do It: CVM’s AI Visibility Process
Influencing AI engines isn’t a one-time optimization. It’s a strategic discipline that we build into our PR programs from day one and monitor throughout the engagement. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Audit Your AI Narrative

We analyze how your company and your competitors are represented across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and other generative engines.

We test dozens of queries—the ones your prospects, investors and partners are actually asking—and document exactly what each AI engines say about you.

The output is an AI Discoverability Analysis that maps your visibility across five categories: brand queries, industry-specific searches, service-specific searches, problem-based searches and review/recommendation queries.

Step 2: Identify Narrative Gaps

We compare what AI engines are saying about you against how you want to be positioned.

Where are the disconnects? Where are you invisible for high-value queries that competitors own? What outdated or inaccurate content is AI referencing?

We also audit the signals AI is drawing from—your Clutch profile, press coverage, owned content, third-party reviews and analyst mentions—to identify which sources are helping and which are hurting.

Step 3: Build a PR Strategy That Feeds AI

This is where AI discoverability and PR converge.

We use these findings to inform a PR roadmap built specifically to close the narrative gaps AI has revealed.

Every PR initiative we undertake is designed with dual impact in mind: reaching human audiences shaping the AI narrative from that point forward.

Step 4: Monitor, Measure and Iterate

AI narratives evolve with every new piece of content that enters the market.

We run ongoing AI audits—following individual PR initiatives and over time—to track how your narrative is shifting, measure the impact of specific placements and adapt the strategy based on what’s working. This means we can show you, concretely, how a specific campaign changed what AI engines say about your company.

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How We Build a PR Strategy That Feeds AI

Earned Media Placements

in the publications and formats AI engines weight most heavily

Thought Leadership

that establishes your executives as authorities in the categories AI associates with your industry

Data and Research Releases

that give AI engines citable, quantified claims about your company’s impact

Curated Press Releases

crafted with the specific language, keywords and structured data that AI engines extract most readily

Client Success Stories With Metrics

that provide the concrete, results-driven evidence AI uses when making recommendations

How your brand gets described when you’re not in the room matters enormously. That now includes what AI platforms say about you.

AI visibility lives inside CVM’s PR practice. The narrative coherence, the messaging consistency, the way every placement builds Sherweb’s narrative in the market. That is the work that AI platforms pull from, and CVM was doing it while most agencies were still figuring it out.

Julie Linzer, Communications Lead
Sherweb

Find Out What AI Is Saying About You

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Questions About AI Discoverability That Companies Often Ask

What is AI discoverability?

AI discoverability is the practice of ensuring your company, brand and key messages are accurately and favorably represented when people ask AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini about topics related to your business. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes for search engine rankings, AI discoverability focuses on shaping the narratives that AI engines synthesize from your earned media, owned content and third-party mentions.

What is AI brand discovery and how does it relate to AI discoverability?

AI brand discovery is the process by which people learn about companies through conversations with AI engines—rather than through traditional search or advertising. AI discoverability is what determines whether your brand shows up in those conversations and how it’s positioned when it does. The two are directly linked: when your AI discoverability is strong, the AI brand discovery experience works in your favor. When it’s weak, prospects discover your competitors instead. CVM’s approach is rooted in earned media because traditional media sources account for an estimated 43% of what AI engines draw on when constructing brand narratives.

How does PR influence what AI engines say about a company?

AI engines build their knowledge from publicly available content—and traditional media is the single largest source they rely on (estimated at 43%). When your company earns coverage in respected publications, publishes thought leadership, issues data-driven press releases or generates third-party reviews, all of that content becomes part of what AI engines use to construct your narrative. Strategic PR ensures that the content entering the AI ecosystem is consistent, accurate and positioned to support your business goals.

How do you audit what AI engines know about our company?

We test your company across all major AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and others) using dozens of real-world queries—the ones your prospects, partners and investors are actually asking. We categorize the results across five dimensions: brand awareness, industry positioning, service-specific visibility, problem-based discovery and review/recommendation queries. The output is a detailed AI Discoverability Scorecard that shows where you’re visible, where you’re invisible and where competitors are appearing instead of you.

Can you actually measure the impact of PR on AI engine results?

Yes. Because AI engines update their knowledge regularly, we can track how specific PR initiatives—a press release, a media placement, a thought leadership campaign—shift your AI narrative over time. We run before-and-after audits to show concrete changes in how AI engines describe your company, what queries you appear for and how your positioning compares to competitors.

How is this different from traditional SEO?

Traditional SEO optimizes your website to rank higher in Google’s search results. AI discoverability optimizes your entire earned media footprint to shape the narrative AI engines tell about you. SEO is about getting found through links. AI discoverability is about controlling the story. They’re complementary: strong SEO gets people to your site, and strong AI discoverability ensures that when someone asks AI about your category, you’re part of the answer—and positioned favorably.

What types of content do AI engines weigh most heavily?

AI engines prioritize content from authoritative, high-credibility sources. The highest-weighted signals include: traditional and trade media coverage (43%), company-owned content like websites and press releases (22%), and industry reports and analyst data (10%). Within those categories, AI especially favors specific quantified results, named client case studies, structured data (like Clutch profiles) and consistent positioning language across multiple sources.

How long does it take to see results from an AI discoverability strategy?

AI engines update their knowledge at different intervals—some reflect new content within days, others within weeks. Clients typically see measurable narrative shifts within 60–90 days of launching an AI discoverability-focused PR program, with compounding improvements as the volume of strategically targeted earned media grows.

Do press releases affect how AI engines represent us?

Yes, significantly. Press releases are one of the most direct ways to put specific, structured messaging into the public domain where AI engines can find it. However, how you write a press release matters more than ever. AI engines extract and weight specific language, claims and data points. A press release optimized for AI discoverability uses the exact terminology you want AI to associate with your brand, includes quantified results and is distributed through channels that AI engines crawl.

We’re a B2B company. Is AI discoverability relevant for us?

It’s especially relevant. B2B buyers increasingly use AI engines to research vendors, compare solutions and build shortlists before ever visiting a company’s website. When a VP of Engineering asks Claude to recommend the best cloud infrastructure provider, or a CMO asks ChatGPT which PR agencies specialize in tech, the AI’s answer carries enormous weight. B2B companies that invest in AI discoverability are making sure they’re on the shortlist before the conversation even starts.