Google made some pretty significant changes to the way it conducts search and presents users with results this week. As you may have guessed, AI is the driving force behind the changes. If you’re involved with or responsible for marketing communications at your organization, you need to pay attention to this.

Google announced what it’s calling the most significant overhaul of its search platform in over 25 years. The biggest new feature is a system of AI-powered agents that work continuously in the background, synthesizing information from across the web and delivering answers directly to users, often without them ever clicking through to a website. The search interface that we’ve all grown accustomed to over the last 20 years or so is being replaced by something that’s a more familiar experience to those of us who have used AI tools regularly for the past couple of years.
For marketing communications professionals, this isn’t a change that’s on the near-term horizon. This is another foundational change that has already happened and that requires us to change our strategies, workflows and skillsets in order to do our jobs well.

Not all content is affected equally. Generic content written primarily to satisfy keyword algorithms is now largely invisible. AI systems pull that information directly into search results without pointing users back to its source. If your content says what everyone else says in roughly the same way, it gets passed over.
What performs well is content that cannot easily be replicated:

• Original research and data: Studies, surveys, or analyses your organization produces that don’t exist anywhere else become a citable asset. A well-distributed original study can generate citations across dozens of secondary sources, compounding your visibility in ways repurposed content never will.
• Real thought leadership: Not opinion for its own sake, but perspective grounded in genuine expertise. A well-developed point of view from your leadership that takes a clear, defensible position on an industry issue will outlast any post summarizing trends everyone already knows.
• Specific case studies: Vague success stories don’t register. Case studies that name the problem, describe the approach, and quantify the outcome earn links, media citations, and AI references because they show proof rather than claim it.
• In-depth content on focused topics: Thorough, well-researched content that fully covers a specific subject performs better than broad, surface-level insights spread across a packed content calendar.

What connects all of these is expertise. Content that reflects what your organization actually knows and has experienced is what earns attention from both readers and the AI tools they increasingly rely on.

In a somewhat ironic and cruel twist, earned media has become much more important in the mix just as it has become more difficult than ever to secure.

Earned media is coverage of your brand, products, services and/or people in, independent publications and media outlets. These can take the form of a story in a respected trade journal, a quote from your leadership in a credible news piece, a feature story in which a journalist shares your perspective, your data, or your story because they (and the outlet for which they work) believe it’s relevant and important to their readers.

Research on this topic illustrates some important trends in the way AI chooses what information to present in search results. Content that appears in multiple credible external sources gets included far more frequently in AI-generated responses than content that only lives on your website. One analysis by Stacker found that broad earned media distribution can increase AI citations by more than 300 percent compared to self-published content alone. That result was substantiated by a more recent study by 5W this month. As it turns out, AI and credible journalists look for the same qualities to determine what merits attention. These include credibility, expertise, independence, consistency and relevance.

Earned media was never easy to secure. Good journalists are pressed for time, selective about sources, and inundated with pitches. A placement in a publication that your audience actually reads and trusts requires real work: a compelling angle, well-developed relationships, timely positioning, and a story that stands on its own merit. That’s the whole point. The credibility that makes earned media valuable to your audience is the same thing that makes it difficult to secure. Even more so now that the number of journalists and news outlets in operation has been cut to the bone. That same credibility is what AI systems are now designed to recognize and reward.

Now is a good time to reevaluate your marketing mix and make sure you’re allocating enough resources to the earned quadrant of the PESO Model©.

There is a second implication to this news that merits attention: message consistency.

AI systems are building a picture of your brand across every touchpoint where your name appears across the information ecosystem. This includes your website, media coverage, social media, user reviews, industry publications, analyst commentary and even influencer mentions. If your message is inconsistent, unclear, or off-brand when you look at all those touchpoints in the aggregate, it dilutes how well you’re understood by the people you’re trying to reach and, increasingly, by the AI tools they’re using to research their decisions.

Consistent, cohesive, authentic messaging that truly reflects your brand’s values, differentiators and personality has always been good communications practice. In an AI-mediated search environment, it’s exponentially more important.

The brands that maintain visibility and connections with their target audiences in an AI-driven world will build their programs around an updated set of priorities. They include:

• Authentic, differentiated owned content that reflects genuine expertise
• Sustained earned media programs that build relationships and credibility across independent sources
• Consistent messaging across every channel where their audiences interact with the brand
• Paid strategies that amplify content with real value and drive users to their websites

This announcement from Google is obviously just the most recent in a deluge of changes impacting the way we work. By the time anyone reads this, it surely won’t be the most recent anymore. The organizations that adapt their communications strategies now will be much better positioned to find, reach and engage their target audiences than those that wait to see how it all plays out.