Search engines are changing—rapidly. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to the usual Google Search results, with the general display not changing very much.
The Rise of AI in Search
Today, search is being upended. On the one hand, Google itself is making serious changes, particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence. For many searches, the top results are now part of an “AI Overview,” which is an example of generative AI. Google’s AI Overview often appears above organic listings and even advertising, reshuffling the presentation of the search engine to the average user.
Those are the changes from within. From without, Google’s market is also shifting. Let’s be honest: Google is still the dominant player, seeing more than 5 trillion searches per year. That’s a lot of searching.
Google searches have also grown about 20% over the last two years, despite the emergence of ChatGPT. But ChatGPT is here, and hundreds of millions of searchers trust it—some even more than Google. The number of weekly active ChatGPT users has exploded in recent years, reaching 100 million in November 2023 and 400 million earlier this year.
Implications for Public Relations
What does all of this mean for public relations? Well, as a PR professional, you need to educate yourself—and quickly—about the role of AI in search results. If AI-generated content is now trumping organic search results and even ads, you can’t just focus on traditional PR strategies and tactics aiming for old-school search results; you need to take AI search outputs into account.
Fortunately, the “old rules” still apply. For example, I recently typed in a Google search for “types of public relations.” At the top of the page was an AI Overview listing media relations, crisis communications, social media management and other examples of PR tricks of the trade.
But these AI answers didn’t just come from nowhere. They were derived from content that was already online, with each answer referencing a specific webpage as justification. In this case, website content from Fiverr, GitHub, a couple of PR agencies’ websites and other online sources was deemed valuable enough by AI to repurpose key messages into new-age search results for me.
Why PR Content Still Matters
This means that PR can play a pivotal role in determining which sources AI uses to generate content in search for millions of people. It could be a news story that AI deems independent and reliable. It might be a website blog post with high SEO value based on commonly used keywords. Maybe it’s a widely read LinkedIn post from a client, who is presented as a thought leader after AI synthesizes and presents their content to us.
For more clarity on how AI Overviews work, we can look at Google’s explanation: “AI Overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine that generative responses can be especially helpful—for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”
In the same way, ChatGPT also pulls information from somewhere. As the BBC reports, ChatGPT scans the web for up-to-date information, including news stories. As OpenAI itself acknowledges, ChatGPT’s responses to queries are based on “information that is publicly available on the internet.” This can include content from Wikipedia pages, scientific journals and media outlets.
All of this should give the PR industry a whole lot of confidence. We’re still very relevant. We’ve been impacting website content for decades, whether it’s through earned media or some other tactic—and we can still do so.
Let’s say you secure a news story in a national magazine. It may not be presented as one of the top three Google results like before, but it very well could end up supporting AI-generated content that appears right at the top of the first page. The presentation of earned media is slightly different now, but media hits themselves are still inherently valuable. Look at it this way: AI needs PR experts to get information.
Adapting to the Future
The times they are a-changin’ for PR, but we have dealt with upheaval in the past. Remember when social media was supposed to erase earned media?
We just need to adapt to the change in front of us and lean into education. Using AI properly is all about learning how it functions and what it needs to function. Now is the time to read, research, rinse and repeat.
This article originally appeared on the Forbes Agency Council CommunityVoice in April 2025.
