Your Autumn PR Plan Has a New Audience: AI

As brands return from summer and start planning for the final quarter of the year, there’s a new question worth adding to the usual PR checklist: what does your AI visibility look like?

September has always felt like a reset moment in PR.

The summer slowdown is mostly behind us. Journalists are back at their desks. Christmas is suddenly alarmingly close. Conversations start turning to Q4, next year’s budgets and what we want our brands to be known for over the next 12 months.

We’re used to asking questions such as:

• What are our competitors talking about?
• Where are the gaps in our media presence?
• What do people find when they Google us?
• Are we associated with the topics we want to own?

Now there’s another question to add to the list: what happens when someone asks AI about us?

AI visibility is becoming part of brand reputation

That doesn’t mean Google is dead. Nor does it mean everyone is suddenly outsourcing every decision to ChatGPT.

But AI-generated answers now form part of the research journey. That makes them another place where people encounter brands and form perceptions.

The Reuters Institute found that weekly use of generative AI for getting information more than doubled between 2024 and 2025, rising from 11% to 24%.

The same research found that 64% of people in the UK had encountered an AI-generated answer while searching online during the previous week.

Whether the person researching you is a customer, journalist, jobseeker or investor, AI increasingly sits somewhere in that information-gathering process.

That makes AI visibility relevant to PR.

AI can only work with the brand story that exists

Ask an AI tool about an industry, product category or business and it has to build an answer from information it can access or has learned from.

That wider information landscape can include your website, media coverage, interviews, reviews, reports, expert commentary and case studies.

Those sources should feel rather familiar to anyone working in communications.

PR has always helped brands build a clear and credible public footprint. The aim is to make sure people can understand who you are, what you do, what you know and why you matter.

AI simply gives us another reason to make that footprint strong.

We’ve explored this changing media landscape elsewhere in our piece on PR in the AI era, because discovery no longer happens through one channel. Search engines, traditional media, social platforms, newsletters, podcasts and AI tools now overlap.

Your brand needs enough consistent evidence across those places for people — and machines — to make sense of it.

If your website still talks about services you changed three years ago, that creates a problem. So does keeping your strongest case studies buried in PowerPoint decks.

The same applies if your spokespeople rarely appear online or competitors dominate media coverage around topics where you actually have greater expertise.

You don’t just have a traditional PR problem. You may have an AI visibility problem too.

AI visibility isn’t just about appearing

Being visible and being accurately represented are two different things.

Two questions matter most:

Do we appear?

And:

What gets said about us when we do?

An AI tool might leave your brand out entirely. It might include you but repeat outdated positioning. It could miss an important service, attribute expertise to a competitor or associate your brand with a market you left years ago.

It might also understand some parts of your business perfectly and completely miss others.

That distinction matters.

A business can have strong name recognition while still suffering from weak AI visibility around the subjects it most wants to own.

And because AI answers vary by tool and prompt, this isn’t about one bad result, it’s about patterns.

How the LRR Soundcheck examines AI visibility

At Little Red Rooster, we explore this through the Little Red Rooster Soundcheck, our AI visibility audit.

The Soundcheck assesses how brands appear across a structured set of relevant questions. We look at what topics AI associates with a brand, how prominently that brand appears and where competitors win visibility instead.

Crucially, we don’t just hand over a score and disappear into the sunset.

The useful bit is understanding why those patterns exist and what you can realistically change.

That might involve clarifying website copy. It could mean publishing stronger proof points or making existing case studies easier to discover.

Sometimes a brand needs to connect its spokespeople more clearly with their areas of expertise. In other cases, the media footprint around a key message simply isn’t strong enough yet.

The point is to improve the underlying information environment.

We’ve already seen how relatively small, targeted changes can improve the way brands appear in AI-generated answers. Repeating the Soundcheck over time also allows teams to track progress and spot new gaps as the landscape changes.

That turns AI visibility from a novelty metric into something communications teams can actually work with.

What can PR do to improve AI visibility?

There’s no magic press release that turns a company into an AI favourite.

No agency can guarantee exactly how a particular model will answer a particular question either. Anyone claiming otherwise should probably be viewed with the same suspicion as someone promising to make you number one on Google by Tuesday lunchtime.

What PR can do is strengthen the public evidence surrounding your brand.

That might mean securing authoritative media coverage around the subjects you want to own.

It could involve building consistent spokesperson commentary so your experts become clearly associated with their specialist areas.

Brands can also publish useful expert content, turn successful client work into accessible case studies and make core messaging clearer across their websites and other channels.

This is where the fundamentals of good communications work become even more valuable.

Authority matters.

Relevance matters.

Consistency matters.

Proof matters.

AI hasn’t made those principles obsolete. It has made them more important.

A model has a much better chance of understanding what your company stands for when credible sources consistently support the same picture.

Don’t start producing content just for robots

This doesn’t mean filling your website with hundreds of generic articles because someone has decided an algorithm might enjoy them.

Please don’t.

The goal isn’t to create content for AI’s sake. It’s to make sure a clear, credible and current picture of your brand exists online.

Good information should work for humans first.

A journalist should quickly understand your expertise. A potential customer should see evidence that supports your claims. An investor should find a coherent picture of the business.

If those things are true, AI systems have much stronger material to work with too.

Strong AI visibility should therefore emerge from better communication, not from filling the internet with synthetic sludge.

Your autumn AI visibility check

As you plan for Q4 and beyond, consider a few simple questions:

• Do you appear? If not, which brands appear instead?
• Is the information accurate and current?
• Are your proof points visible and accessible?
• Are your experts clearly connected with the right topics?
• Do AI tools understand your current products, services and positioning?
• Where are competitors stronger, and why?
• Are the same gaps appearing across several questions or AI platforms?

The aim isn’t to obsess over individual answers.

Instead, look for the gap between how you want people to understand your brand and the information that actually exists for them to find.

That gap is where the useful work starts.

Want to know how your brand currently shows up? Talk to Little Red Rooster about an LRR Soundcheck and we’ll show you where you stand – and what you can do about it.