Buyers don’t search anymore — they ask. The companies that don’t show up in the answer don’t exist.
By Kyle Porter, Executive Vice President & Managing Director, Virgo PR
The buyer journey is no longer search-led. It’s chat-led.
Across the categories Virgorepresents — Web3, biotech, sustainable tech, fintech, AI itself — we’re watching the same shift play out in real time. Decision-makers no longer Google a category, scroll ten blue links, and click into three websites. They open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini, ask a question, and get back a synthesized answer that names two or three companies. Those two or three companies get the meeting. Everyone else doesn’t exist.
This is the most significant change in B2B and B2C buyer behavior since the launch of Google search in 1998. Tech PR has not adjusted.
Most tech communications strategy is still designed for a world where the goal is “rank on page one.” Press releases pushed for backlinks. Bylines placed for SEO authority. Product launches optimized for Google News. All of that infrastructure assumes the buyer eventually clicks through to your site. In 2026, more often than not, they don’t. The model gives them an answer and they move on.
So what actually moves the needle now?
Earned media in the sources the models trust. Large language models pull from a finite set of authoritative outlets — major business and tech publications like Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, top trade press, peer-reviewed research, and a handful of analyst firms. Coverage in those sources doesn’t just reach a human reader anymore; it teaches the model who you are. A single substantive feature in a tier-one outlet can surface in AI answers for years. A press release on the wire does almost nothing. The economics of media targeting have flipped.
Executive thought leadership in long-form, citable formats. The models are voracious consumers of substantive expert content. A CEO who consistently publishes serious, industry-shaping commentary becomes a citable source. That citability is the new currency. Most tech companies have a CEO who tweets occasionally. The competitive ones now have CEOs with documented points of view across half a dozen substantive issues — published in the outlets the models read.
Structured, claim-backed content on the company’s own properties. When the models crawl your site, they’re looking for clear definitions, fact patterns, statistics, and structured data — not marketing language. The companies that win are the ones whose product pages, About pages, and resource libraries are written for both a human reader and a model trying to extract a clean answer to a buyer’s question.
Real reputation work on the surfaces the models actually scan. The models don’t just read TechCrunch. They read Reddit, GitHub, Stack Overflow, G2, and product-review platforms. If your category’s Reddit thread says you’re overpriced and underwhelming, that’s now part of your AI-visible brand. You can’t issue a press release to fix that. You have to build a credible presence in those communities — a discipline most PR firms don’t even staff for.
Measurement that ties to outcomes, not impressions. Most agencies still report on ad-equivalencies and reach. Those metrics were always weak proxies, and they’re now decoupled entirely from buyer behavior. The metric that matters: does your company appear, accurately, in the AI answer when a buyer asks the question that should lead to your product? If yes, you’re winning. If no, none of the rest of it matters.
The transition is happening faster than boards realize. We’ve already had clients tell us their pipeline is filling with leads who say, “ChatGPT recommended you.” That isn’t a future state. That’s a Tuesday morning in 2026.
The 18 months between now and the end of 2027 will sort tech companies into two groups: the ones who built AI visibility into their communications strategy, and the ones who didn’t. The second group will spend the back half of the decade wondering why their pipeline went quiet.
The good news: the playbook is buildable. The bad news: it doesn’t look anything like the press release calendar most tech companies are running today.
If you’re a tech CEO and you can’t tell me, today, how your company shows up in a Perplexity answer for your top three buyer queries — that’s the project for Q1.
— Kyle Porter is Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Virgo PR.
