By Fergus Kibble | FORWARD Agency | March 2026
Your audience is no longer just people. Every piece of brand content you publish is now being read, parsed and evaluated by artificial intelligence. AI systems are deciding which brands get recommended in conversations, which products surface in AI-generated overviews, and increasingly, which purchases get made on a consumer's behalf.
But optimising for these machines does not mean stripping your brand of warmth, wit or personality. It means the opposite. It means getting clearer about who you actually are.
Wharton's Stefano Puntoni, writing in Harvard Business Review in early 2026, frames the challenge neatly. AI is disrupting marketing on two fronts simultaneously (and as we outlined in The Humans Are Coming, the synthetic content flood is accelerating this shift). First, conversational AI is displacing traditional search as the primary way people discover products and services. Second, AI agents are beginning to act as buyers, making purchasing decisions on behalf of consumers.
It is no longer enough to rank on page one of Google. Your brand needs to be the one an AI recommends when someone asks "What is the best sunscreen for Australian conditions?" or "Which PR agency in Sydney specialises in consumer brands?"
McKinsey reports that 88 per cent of organisations now use AI in at least one business function, with 62 per cent actively experimenting with AI agents. The infrastructure for machine-mediated commerce is not being built. It is already built.
There is a common misconception that communicating with AI means reducing your brand to data points and metadata tags. The reality is far more interesting.
GEO strategy favours three things above all else: contextual accuracy, structured clarity and verifiable credibility. AI systems use techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to pull from authoritative sources and named entity recognition (NER) to identify and validate brand mentions. Not keyword density. Not marketing jargon. AI systems are remarkably good at detecting substance, and remarkably unimpressed by spin.
You cannot game an LLM the way you could game a search algorithm. Keyword stuffing, link farms, thin content wrapped in SEO tricks: none of it works when the system reading your content actually understands language. The brands that AI recommends are the ones that communicate clearly, tell genuine stories and build real credibility through earned media.
The qualities that make content legible to machines are the same qualities that make it compelling to humans. Clarity. Consistency. Specificity. A brand that can articulate exactly what it stands for, backed by evidence and told in a way that makes sense, will perform well with both audiences.
When an AI system decides whether to recommend your brand, it weighs five things. Here is what each one looks like in practice.
| Signal | What It Means | Practical Example |
|---|---|---|
| Consistent naming | Your brand name, description and positioning appear the same way everywhere | "FORWARD Agency, Sydney PR and communications" appears identically on your website, LinkedIn, media mentions and directory listings. Not "Forward", "FORWARD Communications" or "Forward PR" in different places. |
| Expertise association | Your brand is linked to specific categories or skill areas | Your brand consistently appears alongside terms like "consumer PR", "earned media strategy" and "AI visibility" in coverage, content and industry commentary. |
| Third-party endorsement | Independent, credible sources reference or recommend you | Trade press quotes your team, industry reports cite your data, journalists reference your campaigns. These carry far more weight than anything on your own website. |
| Recency and relevance | Your information is fresh and current, not outdated | Regular media coverage, recent case studies, up-to-date thought leadership. A blog last updated in 2023 tells AI your brand may no longer be active or relevant. |
| Depth and specificity | Detailed, substantive coverage rather than vague claims | Instead of "we do PR", specific details: "earned media strategy for FMCG brands targeting 25 to 40 year old Australian consumers through culturally relevant campaigns." |
Every piece of brand content now serves two audiences simultaneously. Understanding what each needs, and where those needs overlap, is the key to getting this right.
| Dimension | What Humans Need | What Machines Need |
|---|---|---|
| Trust | Emotional resonance, social proof | Verifiable claims, authoritative sources |
| Clarity | Simple language, scannable structure | Structured data, logical hierarchy |
| Credibility | Brand reputation, peer recommendations | Third-party citations, editorial mentions |
| Relevance | Cultural context, timeliness | Topical authority, semantic relationships |
Notice how both columns keep returning to the same fundamentals: be clear, be consistent, be credible, be specific. These are not new ideas. They are the principles that good communicators have always followed. What's new is that there is now a system reading your content that will hold you to them.
If AI systems value verifiable credibility, where does that credibility come from? Overwhelmingly, it comes from earned media.
When an AI system recommends a brand, the vast majority of its evidence comes from editorial coverage, expert commentary, reviews and third-party mentions. Not from the brand's own website. Not from paid advertising. From the independent sources that PR has always been designed to generate. Creator marketing amplifies this effect by building a rich library of authentic third-party content. Media intelligence platforms like Meltwater now allow brands to track how their earned coverage influences AI-generated responses in real time.
A feature in a credible publication, a quote from an industry expert, a product review in a respected outlet: these are the building blocks of AI brand visibility. Invest in a PR strategy that generates consistent, high-quality coverage. Every feature, quote and review is a trust signal that AI systems use to evaluate your brand.
We saw this play out with our work on the Vaseline slugging campaign. The content resonated with beauty audiences through a culturally relevant trend, but it was also structured in a way that made it highly citable by AI systems. The earned coverage generated clear, factual, contextually rich brand mentions that continue to surface in AI-generated responses months later. Similarly, Dove Camp demonstrated how experiential, people-first activations generate the kind of rich, contextual earned media that AI systems cite repeatedly when answering questions about beauty brand authenticity.
Once you've done the work of making your brand legible to AI, something remarkable happens. You've clarified your positioning, structured your key messages, established your credibility signals and ensured consistency across every touchpoint. All the foundational work that most brands skip or do poorly.
And once that foundation is solid? You're free. Free to run campaigns that are purely emotional, purely creative, purely human. Because the machine already has what it needs.
Think of it as a division of labour. Your earned media and digital foundations feed the machine: structured, accurate, credible. Your campaigns free the human: emotional, creative, culturally alive. You don't have to choose between the two. You need both, and they make each other stronger.
Deloitte's 2026 research reinforces this. Brands must now orchestrate many small, culturally relevant touchpoints rather than relying on single broad campaigns. But they also identified three human truths that resist algorithms: simplicity, social connection and authentic attention. The brands getting this right aren't choosing between machine efficiency and human warmth. They're using the former to amplify the latter.
| Shift | Old Thinking | New Reality |
|---|---|---|
| PR is now structural | PR supports the brand. Nice to have. | Earned media is how AI builds confidence in your brand. It is the primary trust signal, not a supporting one. |
| Consistency is non-negotiable | Slightly different messaging across channels is fine. | AI cross-references everything. Fragmented brand presentation directly undermines your AI visibility. |
| Disciplines are connected | Content, PR, SEO and digital run as parallel workstreams. | They are interconnected parts of one AI visibility system. What your PR team earns feeds what your content team builds and what search engines see. |
| Start with an audit | We will get to AI when we have time. | AI is forming its understanding of your category right now. A comprehensive AI visibility audit maps where you stand across all five signals. |
For a broader perspective on the GEO landscape, our overview of what Generative Engine Optimisation involves provides the foundational context, while our analysis of GEO vs SEO explores how these disciplines relate.
1. Audit your AI presence. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity about your brand. What do they say? What do they get wrong?
2. Build an earned media engine. AI citations come overwhelmingly from third-party sources. Invest in PR that generates consistent, high-quality coverage. Our guide to agentic PR in 2026 explores how AI is reshaping these workflows.
3. Structure your content for clarity. Use clear headings, specific claims and logical organisation. AI systems parse structure as meaning.
4. Ensure consistency across every platform. AI cross-references information across sources. Inconsistency erodes trust.
5. Lead with specificity over aspiration. Instead of "we are a leading innovator," say exactly what you do, for whom, and what makes you different.
6. Make your expertise visible. Publish thought leadership that demonstrates genuine category knowledge. Contribute expert commentary to media stories.
McKinsey estimates that generative AI could create between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion in annual economic value globally. That value will flow disproportionately to the brands that understand how to operate in an AI-mediated world.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring brand content so that AI systems accurately represent and recommend a brand in AI-generated responses. The window to establish AI brand visibility is now. AI systems are forming their understanding of your category, your competitors and your brand right now. The brands that invest in structured, credible, consistent communication today will be the ones AI recommends tomorrow.
There is a beautiful irony at the heart of all this. The rise of AI in brand communications has not made humanity less important. It has made it essential. The brands that succeed will be the ones that do the harder, more rewarding work of becoming genuinely clear, genuinely credible and genuinely distinctive. Communicating with AI is not a departure from brand building. It is a return to its fundamentals.
Fergus Kibble is a communications strategist specialising in earned media, consumer PR and AI visibility. He writes about how brands can build authentic human connections in an increasingly AI-mediated landscape. This article is part of FORWARD's Human Signals series exploring the intersection of human authenticity and artificial intelligence in brand communications.
