You can influence what AI says about you
by Miguel Lucas
AI has become the inevitable intermediary between your brand and the world. A stranger behind your counter who serves your customers before you’ve opened your mouth. That it’s there is a fact. But can you influence what it says about you?
Yes. Though probably not the way you think.
The natural instinct is to do what always worked: build a relationship with the intermediary. For decades, that was the essence of public relations — a $112 billion industry 1 built on managing relationships. With the journalist, there was the pitch, the coffee, the long-term trust. With the analyst, the confidential briefing. With the influencer, the deal and the affinity. It worked because human intermediaries are, above all, people. And among people, reciprocity is the currency.
AI is not. It has no phone, it doesn’t build relationships, it doesn’t accumulate context about who called yesterday. It combs the web, synthesizes what it finds, and responds according to a criterion that no relationship can alter. The result: 62% of brands investing in traditional positioning are invisible to it. In 81% of unbranded queries, it doesn’t even mention them 2. The relational playbook simply doesn’t apply.
And yet, AI is influenceable — just through a completely different channel. It doesn’t respond to who calls it, but to what it finds: what third parties say about you on the open web, the depth and originality of your content, the technical legibility of your data. Content with original data is 4.5 times more likely to be cited; 40% of brands’ expert content, by contrast, is trapped in formats AI can’t even read 2.
Influencing those sources — what the web says about you, the quality of what you publish, the perception of those who speak about your sector — demands better public relations than ever. Not the kind over coffee with a journalist. The kind built on evidence that deserves to be cited and authority that can only be earned through real knowledge.
Every era has added a layer to the grammar of influence. The press rewarded the relationship. Google added the link. Amazon, the metric. AI adds something more uncomfortable: verifiable evidence. The stranger at the counter has no friends. But it has rules. And whoever deciphers them first won’t just control their own narrative — they’ll write the one for everyone who didn’t get there in time.