You’ve got a good grasp on how PR and AI intersect, sold your CEO on the value of a PR mandate aimed at optimizing your brand’s presence on generative engines, and are now ready for the nitty gritty.
It’s time to build a media list for the media outreach campaign aimed at bolstering how you show up in key prompts on GenAI platforms.
Here are the key steps to undertake
Note – this is all based on the assumption you have a GEO monitoring tool like Scrunch, Evertune or Muckrack
1) Decide what AI platforms matter.
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google often cite different sources for the same prompt.
Most consumer tech brands need to prioritize the biggest engines – ChatGPT and Google – but your company could be better served by Claude or Perplexity. If you survey your customers and prospect about their AI usage, you’ll establish what platform(s) to prioritize, and thus figure out what outlets and reporters to target.
2) Identify key prompts.
Figure out what the most important prompts in your category and for your brand are.
Most AI monitoring tools will look at 50-200 prompts for a brand. Not all will matter that much to you – unless the goal is improvement everywhere (I doubt that is a great goal and would encourage most companies to focus on 10-30 priority prompts).
If our client data is to be believed, AI search is so varied across categories that the most cited sources will vary from prompt to prompt.
3) Establish where you currently appear and are positioned in those prompts.
Get a sense of where you sit in important-to-you prompts. If you are established (even a little) in some you will be dominant. In others you likely won’t appear.
Document this, as you probably want to use presence in prompts as a KPI for your GEO-centric PR mandate.
You also want to look at how close to the top you sit in the answers AI is giving. For example, are you at the top of a list of “best of” items?
Document this as well, because your position in prompts is another potential KPI.
Your targeting and outreach should go after sources that will reinforce those places where you have a strong presence and build up your presence on prompts where you are absent or weak.
4) Next, look at source material for the relevant prompts you want to focus on.
Any decent GEO monitoring program will have this capacity built out.
You want to establish:
- What outlets are being most heavily scraped in our category
- What articles are being cited heavily for specific prompts we care about
- What reporters or writers are being scraped the most (everything we have seen suggests AI will prioritize content from reporters it considers experts)
5) From there, build your list using whatever software you like, and design outreach strategies.
Remember that your list may look a little strange. By this I mean there will likely be outlets on there that are small, or that you have never cared about or even heard of. Don’t expect the media that you’d chase to build brand equity with humans to make up the lion’s share of the list. – it may, but it may not.
Other things you’ll want to consider;
- Are you pitching reporters on stories that are already published and evergreen but get periodically updated – things like a buying guide? If so, you might need to allocate money for flat fee or affiliate deals to get into these placements.
- What are you going to do in terms of getting ahead of your competitors on prompts that will matter in the future? I am talking about things like a Black Friday or Xmas relevant set of prompts.
- Are there specific reporters you need to cozy up to and build relations with because they are cited often in AI answers?