A quick digest of five AI+PR updates: how AI and PR intersect, by the numbers. For past editions, click here.
1. AI drives conversion.
According to a SuperPrompt study which analyzed 12 million website visits, traffic driven by AI tools converts at 5.1X the rate of Google organic traffic. This is because that audience has already received an implicit endorsement from the AI. Getting your client into AI answers isn’t just a visibility play. It’s a pipeline play.
2. It is possible to grow your client’s citation rate dramatically in just a couple of months. Here’s the playbook.
It is possible to grow your AI citation rate from 8.6% to 46.9% in just three months, according to Vellum, It comes down to four steps (scroll to the bottom of this post for more info on each.) #1 Make your site crawler-ready #2 Render HTML as markdown #3 Root every prompt in buyer intent #4 Publish two to three optimized articles per week with a disciplined refresh cadence because 75% of AI-cited content comes from the last 30 days.
3. AI cites what it can’t generate.
Any team can ship three articles a week. What no one can fake is why an AI picks you over the eleven other companies doing the same thing. According to Catalyst Content: AI cites what it can’t generate, such as proprietary research, a real POV, quotes from actual people. According to Omniscient Digital’s analysis of 23,000+ AI citations, when someone queries an AI about your brand, 77% of what it references comes from outside your own website – earned media, reviews, community discussions, third-party editorial. A Stacker/Scrunch study found the same: content earned a 325% higher AI citation rate when distributed through third-party news outlets versus sitting on a brand’s own domain.
4. AI search is growing fast — but don’t forget about SEO.
It’s easy to get swept up in the AI search moment, but the scale gap is still enormous. According to SparkToro research, Google processes 14 billion search queries daily while ChatGPT handles roughly 37.5 million – a ratio of 373:1. And, according to Graphite’s March 2026 data, total search usage has grown 26% worldwide as AI and traditional search expand the pie together rather than split it. The brands winning right now are optimizing for both. Traditional SEO signals – domain authority, quality backlinks, structured data, E-E-A-T – are also what AI engines use to decide which sources to trust.
5. Use AI to spot white space opportunities
Before building a single pitch, open your favorite bot and search your client’s category the way a journalist, buyer or consumer would. Read the result not for what’s there, but for what’s not. This kind of gap analysis used to take days of manual media monitoring. AI can now surface it in minutes. According to Muck Rack’s media monitoring guide, AI-powered monitoring has shifted from tracking mentions to identifying narrative patterns, flagging competitive positioning shifts and conversation gaps that signal where a new voice can break through. For PR teams, this changes how strategy gets built. You no longer have to guess where your client has room to own a story. You can query it, read the landscape, and pitch into the open space.
If you want to uplevel your AI Search, reach me here to talk about it.
NOTE: If you need help getting a site “crawler ready” or “rendering HTML as markdown”, see below:
Getting crawler ready
- Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If the file doesn’t block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, you’re already fine — no action required. Most sites don’t block these by default unless someone deliberately added a block (often via a security plugin or hosting provider’s default settings).
- If it’s WordPress, most SEO plugins (Yoast, Rank Math) have a robots.txt editor built into the dashboard. You can edit it yourself in a few minutes.
- If it’s Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, or similar, robots.txt is usually managed by the platform and AI bots are typically allowed by default. You may not have edit access at all, which is fine since these platforms generally don’t block AI crawlers.
Rendering HTML as markdown
Make sure every key message exists as plain readable text on the page. You can run your URL through a free tool like Jina.ai (type “r.jina.ai/” before any URL) to instantly see exactly what an AI crawler sees when it visits your page. The tool returns the clean, parsed text content of the page – essentially what an AI crawler extracts after stripping out navigation, ads, and JavaScript. You could do this yourself without a developer. If the Jina output looks thin, garbled, or missing key content, however, you may need to call someone who can actually touch the code.