AI discovery is the process by which people find brands, products, and information through AI systems. This new channel behaves unlike traditional search engines or social media, offering recommendations rather than lists. Brands cannot buy placement in AI discovery; they must be found credible, consistent, and relevant by the AI system to be named, consolidating attention on fewer brands.
The first underwriter a small business now meets is not a human. It is an AI engine. And the same is true in reverse — the first vetting a business gets from a prospective customer is no longer a Google search.
New 5W research across 125 brands and five industries shows the leaderboard inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews doesn't match the market. Citation share is the new market share — and the gap is wider than most executives realize.
Impressions are no longer a credible consumer PR metric. Four measures replaced them: coverage quality, share of conversation, Share of Model, and contribution to demand. Share of Model (SOM) — the percentage of AI-engine answers in a category that name the brand — is the fastest-rising metric in consumer PR.
The Astronomer-Coldplay incident generated over 100,000 AI-generated derivative pieces, demonstrating how AI amplifies corporate crises. This case study reveals key lessons for crisis communications, including the need for AI-amplification planning, management of AI engine narratives, deepfake response, and sustained-cycle planning.
Citation Share is a new metric for the AI era, tracking brand mentions in AI engine responses. This article outlines a methodology to measure your brand's Citation Share across platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, providing insights for PR and marketing strategies.
Claude is the Anthropic AI assistant used by PR and comms teams for drafting, summarizing, research, message development, and campaign planning. Its value is judgment-adjacent — strong at structured thinking, careful at hedging.
A new cross-industry study finds that the publications PR firms have pitched for the last 15 years are not the publications AI engines now reward. The study, "The Trade Press AI Index 2026," analyzes 680 million AI citations and finds that 15 domains own 68% of the AI citation market, a concentration far more extreme than Google PageRank ever produced. The Index outlines five shifts every comms function should execute in the next 90 days.
A synthesis of Pew Research, Stanford HAI, Ipsos, and Data for Progress data reveals a 99-point favorability gap between daily AI users and non-users. The implications for brands, agencies, and the future of consumer marketing.
Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube now produce most AI engine citations. Reddit + YouTube = 78.2% of AI social citations. The cross-cluster hub for AI retrieval.