You’re not ranking anymore. You’re citing.

Why AI answer engines are a comms problem, and why that’s good news for PR & Marketing

Jess Ratty, Founder & CEO, Halo

Underneath the new acronyms and big chat, how to appear in AI search engines is the newest and yet, oldest, comms problem there is: when someone asks a question about your industry, does your name come up? Is what’s said about you true? Is the answer what you need it to be? Is it what you want it to be? 

The interface has changed. People aren’t searching, scrolling and clicking their way to your website anymore. They’re asking Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and reading one incredibly confident answer – and taking that as truth.

In early 2026, 68% of US Google searches ended without a click. When Google shows an AI summary, clicks on the traditional results nearly halve, and only around 1% of people click the links inside the summary itself. The old goal was traffic. The new goal is authority: being named, cited and explained correctly inside the answer. 

That’s why we’ve started saying it to clients: you’re not ranking anymore, you’re citing. Or – let’s face it, you are needing to do both… 

PR matters more in this world, not less.. 

AI systems build their answers from sources they treat as trustworthy, and that means earned media. Muck Rack’s 2026 analysis found 84% of AI citations came from earned media. Paid and advertorial content? 0.3%. Credible journalism is teaching AI what to trust.

So the trade title feature, the analyst quote, the well-placed piece of national coverage: these were never just one week of attention. They’re now long-term authority assets that shape how machines describe your company for months afterwards. If anything, the business case for consistent, credible comms and PR backup up with structured marketing – is stronger than ever before. 

But there’s a catch, and it matters enormously in the sectors we work in (space, tech, AI, defence, robotics, science, biotech) You can appear in the answer and still lose, because if the AI has built its picture of you from other people’s information, the answer might be wrong. In space, defence, deep tech and biotech, where the questions are loaded with risk, regulation and national interest, a confident wrong answer about your company is worse than no answer at all. When it comes to giving investors the information they need – you’d best get it right as it delivers to your commercial growth and scalability. Imagine losing an investor’s interest at the first search of your company name? Feeding the engine the right narrative, through your own channels, your coverage and your partners, is now a critical part of the job.

Why search loves LinkedIn… 

One finding that surprises almost every client: LinkedIn is the second most cited domain in AI search, and number one for professional queries. It’s open to the AI systems in a way many news sites no longer are, and it’s stacked with the thing answer engines are hunting for: identifiable experts explaining things in straight up simple human to human language – it’s AI joy! 

For B2B businesses, this changes what LinkedIn is for. It’s not corporate social anymore, it’s a professional trust signal. And it shouldn’t all sit on the company page. The corporate channel holds the official record, leaders interpret why it matters, regional teams make it locally relevant, and your engineers and technical experts supply the credibility layer. One narrative, many voices, all reinforcing each other. These are born-global narratives. 

Think like a publisher, not a campaign team

The clients we work with in space know this pattern well: a mission or a major announcement, a spike of coverage, then a quiet period. The quiet period is where authority is now built or lost, because answer engines reward consistency. A rolling drumbeat of market insight, leadership commentary and technical explainers between the big moments means every future announcement lands harder and lasts longer.

In practice, we run every story through the same loop. Earned placement first. Then leadership interpretation on LinkedIn. Regional amplification. A source-of-truth page on your own site that gives the AI something solid to pull from. Partner citations, because partners saying the same thing about you is the new backlink. Then we monitor the answers themselves: ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, and check you show up accurately.

The playing field just levelled

Here’s the bit I love the most. This new world doesn’t only reward the biggest brands with the biggest budgets. It rewards genuine expertise, explained clearly and consistently. A brilliant engineer at a fifty-person space company can carry as much weight in an AI answer as a prime’s press office, if the signals are right. For challenger businesses, that’s a door that was never open before.

So the question to take back to your team isn’t “what’s our AI strategy?” It’s simpler and harder: what are the five, ten, 15, 20 questions you most want to be the trusted answer to? Start there. Build the evidence, earn the coverage, spread it through the right voices, and then check how the machines are talking about you. 

This isn’t an AI side project. It’s the next operating layer for communications, and comms teams are the ones leading it.

Halo is a communications and PR agency working with clients across space, defence, deep tech, biotech and sustainability. If you’d like to know what the AI engines are saying about your company right now, ask us. We’ll show you.