How to Shape a Brand’s AI Visibility in 2026: Six Moves for Communications Teams

As AI increasingly determines what gets said about brands, communications teams can rise as architects of brand visibility – driving the credibility, narratives, and signals that AI relies on. This article outlines the six strategies communicators can use to help shape whether their brand shows up in AI, and how.

PR has always been about relationships. The ones that move needles, build credibility, and shape how the world sees you. Now, the most powerful voices are AI powered assistants you’ll never meet, answering questions you’ll never hear.

When someone asks ChatGPT or other Large Language Models (LLMs) about your company, they get a synthesized answer from thousands of sources, including your website, your LinkedIn posts, your press releases and your hard-earned media coverage.  And only 8% of people consistently verify these responses. The vast majority just accept them at face value.

While these changing behaviors have become the new enemy of the C-suite, it is re-writing the playbook for you as a communicator, putting PR professionals at the most powerful intersection to solve it.

How? You influence what gets published. You shape narratives and determine consistency. You build the earned media relationships that influence these LLM systems. And you have meaningful leverage to shape how AI learns about your company.

This is not a new job. It’s the same job with a much larger stage.

Top 6 Communications Strategies to Increase Potential AI Visibility

AI is evolving quickly, but you can drive positive impact today through everyday programming you already know how to do. Here is how to get started:

1. Press releases are your AI blueprint. Despite the name, press releases are really just centralized documents that help explain your brand and your products. As AI has emerged, press releases have returned as a valuable source of truth to inform how machines understand you too. In a recent audit, FleishmanHillard found that optimized releases, on a company’s owned newsroom, can inform as much as 20% of what appears when someone asks an LLM about your company. Publish press releases and write them for machines – which luckily will make them easier for humans to read too – with clarity, facts first, no fluff. Make it crawlable and easily extractable. Make it count.

2. Depth beats reach. Vertical-specific publications that go deep on your topic can carry more weight with AI than hundreds of mentions in top-tier press. In many cases FleishmanHillard has seen single outlets contribute to 20-50% or more – of all AI responses about a single brand. Identify who these folks are for you and help them write informative and detail-rich stories. While maybe smaller in traditional reach, these key media carry huge, concentrated influence tohelp make your company visible within LLM responses.

3. Consistency wins. AI systems reward consistency. It’s one of the strongest signals of credibility. If your brand says different things across your website, press releases, bios and media coverage, it weakens trust and LLMs will turn elsewhere. Standardize 2-3 positioning statements, key topics of importance, and repeat them relentlessly. Every consistent mention reinforces the last. This is how machines learn to trust you and how you can build authority.

4. Answer the questions they’re actually asking. Identify your top 10 audience questions about your space. Better yet, ask ChatGPT what they are. Then answer them. Directly. Publish them where AI will find them. When LLMs search for expert voices in your category, yours should be cited.

5. If you want it known, it must be published: LLMs need data to crawl, so if something important lives behind a paywall or happens at a live event, it is largely invisible in AI outputs. Publish it on YouTube, LinkedIn, your blog, and your website. The content you put out is the content AI learns from. The content you gate might as well not exist.

6. Technical details matter: Metadata. Schema markups. Structured headings. You can partner with your web team on this. It can be the difference between being crawlable and creating unbranded real estate. Make sure it’s done.

The C.R.A.W.L.S. Framework to Increase AI Visibility Strategy

These six moves form a framework that can be easily remembered. Just remind yourself to create a strategy that C.R.A.W.L.S.

Consistency.

Releases.

Authority.

Written.

Linchpin media.

Structured backend.

If yes to all six, you’re not just generating coverage. You’re actively educating the systems that shape how the world understands your brand.

You Already Know How to Do This

LLM accuracy will depend heavily on the quality of input. PR teams will be able to create and optimize content that has the most potential to be visible to LLMs and help shape how their industry is defined.