People are building their trust in AI services, and what those services say about your business comes largely from what journalists have written about you.
For some time now, brazil™ has been quietly helping clients appear in the answers AI gives, and it is time we explained how.
Google used to be where people went to find a business, and most of us knew the routine of typing in what we wanted, scrolling past four adverts and a sponsored recipe, and eventually finding the opening hours of the chemist. That habit is changing faster than most businesses realise.
We asked 4,000 people how they look for information, and 46 per cent told us they are frustrated with Google. What struck me more was that 21 per cent now rely on AI alone, which means one in five people no longer search at all, they ask ChatGPT or Gemini and act on what it tells them.
If you are not in the answer, you are not in the running
People rarely look beyond the answer. Pew Research Center found that only one search in a hundred led to a click on a link inside Google’s AI summary, so if your business is not named, the customer has gone elsewhere before you knew they were looking.
AI still reads the papers
I started out as a journalist, so this part pleased me. Muck Rack studied more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and found that 84 per cent came from earned media, the coverage a business wins rather than pays for. AI trusts what independent journalists say about you far more than what you say about yourself, and it prefers recent coverage, so the glowing profile from 2019 now carries about as much weight as a fax number.
Speed still wins
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that Uber drivers were workers, the lawyers quoted within hours were not always the best known, they were the ones who had written their comment before the judgment came out, while bigger names were still arguing over a press release. We believe that coverage is what AI reads back years later when someone asks which employment lawyer to call.
How we get you there
Our recommendations are to start with something nobody else has, usually a market report built from your own data, because journalists want fresh numbers and AI follows the journalists. We then put your senior people in front of the national and trade reporters who cover your sector, prepare comment before predictable news breaks, and make sure your website and listings say the same thing as the coverage.
There is no shortcut, and anyone offering one is selling something that will stop working at the next update. The way into AI’s answers is the same as the way into a good newspaper, which is to be worth writing about.
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