If you’ve recently spotted 'chatgpt.com' showing up as a session source in Google Analytics, you’re not alone. It’s not a bot anomaly – it’s a sign of a major shift in how people search for information online. Where once SEO was about appeasing Google’s algorithms, the next wave is being driven by AI-powered discovery platforms. These aren’t just tools that answer questions. They’re becoming the new front doors to the internet.
The decline of traditional search
For years, SEO professionals have lived and died by keywords, backlinks, and page authority. But the search landscape is fragmenting. Increasingly, people are turning to conversational AI for answers – tools that don’t serve up a list of links but instead synthesise information into coherent, human-like responses.
That subtle difference is seismic. Instead of competing for visibility on a search results page, brands are now vying to be referenced and reinterpreted by large language models (LLMs) that draw from across the web.
The rise of AI-driven discovery
Unlike search engines that crawl, index, and rank pages for click-throughs, AI models consume content to understand context, intent, and meaning. They don’t just read metadata, but also interpret nuance. The better your content communicates relevance and authority, the more likely it is to inform an AI’s understanding of your topic area.
In practice, this means structured, consistent, and semantically rich content. Clear titles, accurate schema markup, machine-readable summaries, and accessible writing. All of which sit neatly in the PR agency wheelhouse.
A new frontier for PR and communications
This evolution creates a unique opening for PR agencies. News articles, blogs, and forum discussions are prime sources for AI training data and contextual understanding. The same content that drives public perception now directly informs the way AI platforms understand and describe industries, leaders, and issues – at a semantic level, not just a textual one.
If you’re a PR professional, you’re already skilled at framing narratives, and are perfectly placed to ensure that brand stories are represented accurately in the AI ecosystem. That means ensuring releases are published in crawlable formats, structured with clarity, and distributed across authoritative, public-facing domains.
When an AI assistant summarises “who leads the conversation on sustainability” or “what’s shaping Australia’s tech policy,” it’s drawing on that web of publicly available information – newsrooms, government releases, and online commentary. Those who shape the narrative at the source will shape the narrative in the “machine”.
The new buzzwords of AI search
If you’re wondering what “AI search” actually means, you’re not alone. As more of us start turning to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini instead of Google, a new set of terms is popping up. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s what:
- AI search – The broad shift from typing keywords into a search bar to asking an AI for answers straight up
- Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) – A specific strategy within AI SEO that prioritises creating content that directly and concisely answers user questions, aiming to be featured in AI-generated summaries and answers rather than just ranking on a traditional search results page
- Semantic search – Instead of just matching words, AI understands the meaning behind what you’re asking
- Knowledge graphs/entity search – Think of this as a big web connecting people, places, and ideas so AI can find contextually relevant answers
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) – The tech that lets AI “look things up” before answering, so it’s pulling from reliable, real-time sources
- Answer engines/conversational search – The new breed of tools that chat back with full answers rather than a list of links
- Entity SEO/AI search optimisation – The next evolution of SEO, focused on helping AI understand and trust your content.
Structuring for the age of AI
Here are some quick tips to make your content easier for AI platforms to ingest:
- Use schema markup for articles, FAQs, and products to define relationships and meaning
- Write with clarity and context. AI thrives on structured argument and unambiguous language
- Link authoritatively. Citations and credible backlinks still matter for AI weighting
- Publish on open, indexable platforms – not gated or hidden behind paywalls
- Maintain factual consistency. AI models favour corroborated information across multiple sources.
From search visibility to knowledge presence
SEO is evolving from visibility in search results to presence in knowledge systems. Success isn’t measured by your rank on a search page but by how accurately and frequently you’re referenced in an AI’s answer.
For communications professionals, this is a chance to lead. By thinking like publishers, strategists, and information architects, PR agencies can help clients stay visible to people, and the algorithms that now interpret the world for them.