This is due, in no small part, to AI and the increasing use of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude by consumers and businesses to search for information they can trust.

The chatbots are underpinned by Large Language Models (LLMs), which have been described as the “engine under the hood” and which are trained on mass datasets including news stories, articles and blogs authored by journalists and PR consultants.

Ensuring the messages you want your audiences to see feature on credible online sites has therefore never been more vital, irrespective of the size of your business.

If you’re an estate agent operating in a specific part of the country, this means ensuring your local media – many now having adopted a digital-first approach – receive and publicise your news. And to ensure that you are a regular source of news stories.

Alternatively, you might be a B2B company, perhaps in the logistics or tech space, where a small number of trade media are a key route to you acquiring new clients or building strategic relationships. As with the estate agent, the more your company announcements or thought leadership articles appear online in trade media, the more visibility you will have when potential customers search for you using AI tools.

In fact, they don’t even need to actively use AI tools, as the AI summaries that now populate the top of search engines like Google are often the first thing that people searching for information will see. Featuring in credible online news outlets will give you the best possible chance of appearing in these AI summaries.

Building out your company’s news and wider resources section is also hugely important with regular written articles, opinion pieces and news items, along with video, and then disseminating via relevant social channels. This will support the PR activity already referred to in building authority for your business or brand and heightening the likelihood of you being found in searches.

The growing influence of PR professionals is being seen at other levels too. According to the WSJ, some of the world’s biggest companies are adding their communications chiefs to the C-suite, to give CEOs the best possible chance of navigating a complex and diverse comms landscape.

This is supported by research by the global recruiter Korn Ferry which reports that nearly half of chief communications officers surveyed in 2025 said they report directly to their company’s CEO, up from 40% in 2023 and 37% in 2015.

Sona Iliffe-Moon, chief communications officer at Yahoo, told the WSJ: “Everything is under a microscope, and the cost of getting things wrong is very, very high.”

The involvement of comms professionals is going deeper than ever.

Iliffe-Moon said she frequently attends meetings with engineers and product managers, acting as a stand-in for the everyday, often cynical consumer.

Referring to the launch of the company’s AI assistant, Yahoo Scout, she said: “My role wasn’t just to think about how we’d talk about the product at or after launch, it was to help evaluate whether it was genuinely useful and trustworthy for consumers while it was still being built.”

Tamika Young, VP of Global Communications at dating app Hinge, told the WSJ that shaping and maintaining a strong, consistent PR narrative was more critical than ever.

“It’s not just about engagement metrics or advertising campaigns anymore,” she said. “You’re looking to build trust with these audiences, and a lot of that really stems from the messaging.”

You can read the WSJ article in full here.

* To find out about Mason Media’s PR services, including our strategy counselling sessions for businesses, email: nick@masonmedia.co.uk or call 0151 239 5050.