How AI and generative search are changing digital PR and SEO

AI powered tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT are reshaping how people search for information.

While traditional search results (SERPs) display a ranked list of blue links influenced by SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) factors such as keyword relevance, backlinks, domain authority, and technical onsite performance, AI Overviews takes a different approach - transforming content from multiple sources into a single, concise, contextualised summary.

As a result, it’s clear that traditional SEO tactics alone may no longer be enough to keep your brand visible online in 2025 and beyond. We’re entering a new era of search - one where optimising for generative engines is just as important as ranking in traditional SERPs. And before long, it could become even more important - especially if Google continues to position generative AI responses at the very top of search results (e.g. AI Mode). This could fundamentally change how information is surfaced, cited, and prioritised - and this is where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) comes in.

Instead of ranking individual websites, AI Overviews extract key insights from sources they deem trustworthy. This typically includes established domains with strong reputations, reputable publishers such as news outlets, and expert-led content written or reviewed by verified professionals.

This shift means that visibility is no longer just about ranking well - it’s simply about being featured in the content that these AI tools are drawing from. And that’s where digital PR becomes essential. Brands need to earn high quality, authoritative coverage to stay part of the conversation.

Generative search is changing the game - but digital PR can still keep you playing. Read on to discover how digital PR can help brands stay visible in AI powered search results and the evolving landscape of GEO.

What’s in this article:

How do brands feature in AI tools and LLM responses?
How digital PR earns the brand mentions AI is looking for
Is LLM visibility actually valuable for brands?
The future of attribution in a generative world
Key takeaways

How do brands feature in AI tools and LLM responses?

As it stands, there’s currently no hard and fast rule stating exactly what brands need to do to feature in AI tools and LLM responses - but the research is being done.

Ahrefs published a report at the end of May 2025 looking at brand visibility factors in AI Overview. They analysed 75,000 brands to find out which search factors correspond with higher brand visibility in AI Overviews.

The results are eye opening - especially for digital PR and SEO professionals who focus heavily on link building. The report found that branded web mentions have the strongest correlation with visibility in AI Overviews, significantly outperforming traditional backlinks. In fact, brands earning the most web mentions appear in up to 10 times more AI Overviews than those in the next closest quartile.

The key takeaway here is that the strongest signals tied to AI Overview mentions are off-site factors. Visibility in generative search is clearly not just about what’s happening on your own website - it’s about how often and how widely your brand appears across the web. So, in a nutshell, your brand’s online presence is everything.

Seer Interactive published a similar study, titled What Drives Brand Mentions in AI Answers? and its findings echoed those of Ahrefs. While they initially expected backlinks to play a major role, the study revealed that their direct impact on brand visibility in large language models (LLMs) was weak or neutral.

That said, links may still hold indirect value, as this study also found that brands ranking on page one of Google had a strong correlation with LLM mentions. Since backlinks remain a key ranking factor in traditional SERPs, their knock-on effect - boosting rankings, which in turn may influence AI visibility - shouldn’t be underestimated. All is not lost for the humble backlink!

And as it stands, SERPs continue to matter. While Google is testing features like AI Mode, which could dramatically change how search results are presented (potentially even replacing traditional SERPs altogether!) for now, they remain accessible and widely used. Thankfully, backlinks still play a role in helping pages rank and gain visibility in both traditional and generative search formats. They haven’t suddenly lost their value.

Brand mentions are the currency of LLMs

So to summarise, the evidence so far generally suggests that online brand mentions are one of the key factors influencing whether brands appear in relevant AI prompt responses and LLM-generated content. Rank Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of SEO tool Moz, reinforced these findings back in October 2024 when he said:

“The currency of Google search was links. The way that you ranked in these results was through links, relevant content, smart keyword use, and references to your work from sources the search engines crawled.

The way that you rank in large language models is not that [...] The currency of large language models is mentions (specifically, words that appear frequently near other words) across the training data.”

The training data that Fishkin is referring to here is the vast collection of publicly available text that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or the models powering Google’s AI Overviews are trained on. This includes things like:

Web pages crawled from the open internet, like blogs, news sites, forums, and informational websites
Wikipedia and other online encyclopaedias
e-books and academic papers
Public social media posts and comments
Q&A sites and forums like Reddit and Quora
Product descriptions, reviews, and online content repositories

This once again highlights a key difference between how traditional search engines and LLMs operate. Search engines like Google rely heavily on links and SEO signals to rank results, whereas LLMs generate responses based on patterns found in their training data. That means brands mentioned frequently - and in relevant, high-quality contexts - are more likely to be included in AI generated answers.

So, if you want your brand to appear consistently in AI tools and LLM responses, simply publishing good content on your own site isn’t enough. You need to ensure that your brand is mentioned in the right places, in lots of different pockets of the internet. The more helpful, accurate, and widely referenced your brand and your content is - whether on your website, forums, or trusted third-party sources - the more likely it is that AI tools will surface and cite your brand. It’s as simple as that!

So… where does that leave brands that don’t already have high visibility or a strong digital footprint?

Well, this is where digital PR becomes essential, as it’s one of the most effective ways to secure authoritative brand mentions across high-quality, trustworthy sources - exactly the kind of content AI tools are trained on and draw from.

How digital PR earns the brand mentions AI is looking for

If you want your brand to be seen and surfaced in the future of search, you need to be talked about online now - and a robust digital PR strategy is how you can make that happen.

Whether it’s landing expert commentary in a national news outlet, contributing to industry roundups, or earning coverage on relevant niche sites, digital PR has always helped to put your brand in the places that matter - and consistently. These aren’t just vanity wins or SEO bonuses, they’re indicators of authority, relevance, and credibility, which are the very signals generative AI tools are trained to recognise and reproduce in their responses.

As you consistently earn high quality media coverage, digital PR helps build a rich web of brand mentions across sources that AI models are likely to crawl, learn from, and cite. It gives your brand a presence in the kind of structured and trustworthy content that’s more likely to be surfaced in AI Overviews and LLM-generated answers.

Backlinks vs. brand mentions

Now, as far as we can tell, there will never be a downside to earning high-quality backlinks across the web - so if we continue to generate some backlinks along the way, great! But the fact that brand mentions are once again becoming the currency of online search is probably music to many digital PR professionals’ ears. For years, we’ve been explaining to clients that brand mentions contribute to online visibility and brand authority. We’ve talked about how they’re still valuable signals to Google, but much of that message has often been overshadowed by the demand for links, links, and more links.

But we can now say with more confidence than ever: if your digital PR campaign lands a high-quality, relevant feature in a leading publication that includes strong, contextual mentions of your brand - even without a backlink - that’s still a huge win. Mentions help LLMs understand who you are, what you do, and why you’re credible. And in the age of generative search, that matters just as much - if not more - than a hyperlink.

Is LLM visibility actually valuable for brands?

So far, we’ve ascertained that brand mentions are the currency of AI search and explored how digital PR helps brands earn visibility in AI tools and LLM-generated responses - but that raises an important question: what does that visibility actually translate to?

Unlike traditional search, where a click on a blue link brings someone directly to your website, LLMs often provide answers without requiring users to leave the platform. This shift challenges long standing SEO metrics like click-through rates (CTR), sessions, and website traffic sources - and leaves many wondering whether LLM visibility is just brand awareness, or if it can actually drive measurable results. Well, there’s a couple of ways of looking at this.

The pros: visibility, trust, and authority at scale

Even if LLMs don’t always drive direct traffic, there are real benefits to featuring in AI responses:

Massive reach: Tools like AI Overviews are built into Google Search, which means huge volumes of users are seeing AI generated summaries as their first (and possibly only) interaction with a topic.
Perceived authority: Being mentioned in an AI generated answer carries an implicit endorsement - users assume these tools surface the most reliable, trustworthy sources.
Brand awareness: Even if the user doesn’t click through, consistent brand exposure in credible contexts helps build familiarity and top-of-mind awareness.
Non-click engagement: In scenarios where AI tools mention your brand and a user then independently searches for you, visits your site, or engages through another channel, you may never see the click attributed - but the brand impact is still real.

The cons: limited traffic, broken attribution, and less control

Of course, LLM visibility isn’t a silver bullet - and it comes with limitations:

Fewer clicks: If AI tools answer the question well enough, there may be no need for the user to click through to a source site at all.
Attribution blind spots: Because AI generated responses often blend multiple sources and don’t always cite them clearly, it’s hard to know when your brand has been mentioned - let alone measure the impact.
Lack of consistency: AI generated responses vary depending on the model, query phrasing, and even timing of a prompt. That means your visibility might be inconsistent, even if your content remains strong.

In many ways, the pros of LLM visibility tie in directly with the purpose and outcomes of digital PR. In fact, they reflect the core objectives of the discipline at its heart.

One of PR’s fundamental aims is to get your brand in front of as many relevant people as possible, across a mix of trusted and high traffic channels. Being surfaced in AI Overviews - which currently sit above the SERPs and are embedded into how people consume information - gives you exactly that. It’s earned visibility at scale, often with a level of exposure even top tier media coverage might struggle to match.

And at its core, PR works to position your brand as a credible expert, thought leader, or go-to solution in your space. So when an AI tool selects your brand to help answer a query, it’s a powerful signal of authority and trustworthiness. It reinforces the very reputation PR seeks to build, especially when these mentions sit alongside other known or reputable sources.

But we can’t overlook the issue with measuring and attributing this kind of visibility.

While AI Overviews and other generative search features offer huge reach and brand exposure, they currently offer very little in the way of trackable traffic. Mentions in AI generated responses don’t always include clickable links, and even when they do, users are often engaging passively - absorbing the information without ever visiting your website.

This is already starting to become evident in the data. Since the rollout of AI Overviews, many search marketers are noticing a disconnect as impressions are creeping up in Search Console, yet clicks are stagnating - or in some cases, falling. It’s a clear signal that more users are getting the information they need directly from the search results, without needing to click through.

GA4 does allow you to track referral traffic that comes from platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity as it stands, but this data is still relatively limited and inconsistent. Because these AI tools don’t always act like traditional browsers or referral sources, their visibility in your analytics can vary. As a result, marketers are facing a growing attribution gap. Brand mentions might be increasing across AI platforms, but the actual impact on website performance is much harder to measure.

Despite this, the influence of AI search tools is expected to grow significantly, with some forecasts showing that by 2028, LLM generated search traffic will overtake traditional organic search - making it essential for brands to establish visibility now.

The future of attribution in an AI generative world

As search evolves, so too must the way we measure success. Attribution models that rely solely on direct clicks or conversions are becoming increasingly outdated in an AI-driven landscape where brand visibility can happen without a single click.

Instead, brand awareness, sentiment, and recall will play a bigger role in evaluating digital PR performance. We’ll need to get more comfortable with indirect impact - where a user sees your brand in an AI answer, doesn’t click, but later searches for you, follows you on social media, or converts through a different channel.

This means that in many ways, we’re going back to the ‘old school’ fundamentals of PR. Think back to before digital PR and SEO were even a thing. You’d secure a feature in a national magazine or trade title, but you’d never know exactly how many people saw it or what they did afterwards. Instead, you’d rely on rough estimations, readership figures, or even AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent - what a throwback!) to prove its worth.

So, the rise of generative search feels oddly familiar. At present, we don’t have reliable ways to measure how many people have seen your brand mentioned in an AI Overview, or how many have engaged with it. But that doesn’t mean the impact isn’t happening - it just means we need to look at it differently.

One emerging approach is to monitor shifts in search behaviour. Tools like Google Trends, Search Console, or SEO platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs can help identify whether there’s been a spike in branded searches or related queries following digital PR activity targeted at a particular keyword, category, or topic - especially if you know your brand has been featured in AI Overviews for those terms.

Some brands are already beginning to lean more on things like:

Search volume growth for brand and product terms
Uplift in direct traffic following coverage or mentions
Social listening and brand sentiment tools to detect visibility spikes

This kind of indirect attribution is probably going to become increasingly important. It’s about reading between the lines, recognising patterns, and understanding that influence and visibility don’t always come with a neat tracking link. Much like traditional PR, LLM visibility isn’t always about immediate clicks, but rather long term brand impact.

Key takeaways

Brand mentions matter more than backlinks in generative search. Recent studies show that branded web mentions have a stronger correlation with visibility in AI Overviews than backlinks. AI tools are prioritising brands that are frequently and contextually mentioned across the web.
Traditional SEO is no longer enough. With the rise of tools like Google’s AI Overviews, ranking on traditional SERPs isn’t the only way to be visible. Brands now need to optimise for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) - making sure AI tools can surface and cite them.
Digital PR is essential for GEO. To feature in AI generated answers, brands need coverage on trusted, high authority sites. Digital PR helps earn these mentions in the right places, feeding the content ecosystem that AI tools are trained on.
LLM visibility builds trust - even without clicks. Being mentioned in AI summaries signals authority and credibility, even if users don’t click through. This visibility supports brand awareness and long term reputation, though measurable traffic may be limited.
Attribution is becoming more complex. Generative search often doesn’t link back to the original source, making it hard to track direct ROI. Marketers will need to rely more on indirect metrics like branded search volume, direct traffic spikes, and sentiment analysis.
We’re returning to PR fundamentals. As metrics like CTR and conversions become less reliable, we’re shifting back to traditional PR values: reach, visibility, and influence - even when the impact isn’t immediately measurable.

Want your brand to show up in AI search results? Speak to our PR team to start earning the coverage and brand mentions that matter.