AI Search
October 25, 2024
In short. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overview which toy brand to buy or which agency to hire, the answer is built from sources the model trusts. Muck Rack’s analysis of more than a million AI citations found that 95% point to non-paid sources and 89% to earned media. Gartner expects PR and earned media budgets to double by 2027 for this reason. When we ran our own buyer-style prompts in September 2026, the pages that got Swerve named were case studies, an industry page and a client-news post, never an ad and never a press release on its own. If you want your brand in the answer, you need coverage that quotes you and pages worth quoting. That is PR work.
What AI citation is
AI citation is the set of sources a large language model references when it answers a question. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews don’t rank ten blue links. They read a handful of pages they trust, synthesize an answer, and often attribute it with a link, a mention or a quoted line.
Which pages count as trusted? Muck Rack looked at more than one million links cited by AI systems and found that 95% were non-paid and 89% were earned media. Journalism alone accounted for 27% of all citations, and for questions about recent events it rose to 49% (Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading?, 2025).
So the practical definition for a brand is this. AI citation is the moment a model decides your brand belongs in the answer, and it makes that decision based on what independent, credible sources have said about you.
For twenty years, brands fought for visibility through search. Keywords, rankings, backlinks, paid placements. The whole machine was built to win on Google.
That machine is still running, but the traffic is moving. Gartner reports that ChatGPT’s traffic grew 608% and Perplexity’s 262% year over year between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025, while Google and Bing each slipped about 1% (Gartner, Top Predictions to Inform 2026 Comms Strategies). Search still holds the volume. The growth is somewhere else.
Gartner’s prediction from the same report: “By 2027, mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a 2x increase in PR and earned media budgets.”
Picture the parent planning a birthday. Instead of typing “best STEM toy for 6 year old” and opening eight tabs, they ask, get three names back, and buy one. If your brand isn’t one of the three, you weren’t in the room.
An answer engine is built to produce an answer it can defend. That pushes it toward sources with editorial standards, which is why journalism and other earned coverage carry so much weight. Four things make earned media attractive to a model.
Independent validation. A review in a parenting magazine or a mention on a national newscast is a third party saying your product is worth attention. Your own site saying the same thing carries less weight because every brand says it.
Domain authority. News outlets, trade publications, universities and government sites have histories of being right, and models treat them as reliable by default.
Narrative context. A news story comes with a quoted expert, a date, a place and a reason the product matters now. That structure is easy for a model to read and reuse.
Recency. For anything time-sensitive, a hot-toy list, a recall, a holiday trend, recent coverage dominates. Muck Rack found that for recent queries nearly half of citations came from journalism.
For a communications lead, this changes what coverage is for. A placement used to be about reputation. Now it’s also about whether your brand exists in the answer at all.
Reports are one thing. In September 2026 we ran our own test: 15 buyer-style prompts (the kind a brand manager would type when looking for help, with a US and a Canadian frame) across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, repeated to check that the results held.
Swerve was named in 10 of the 15 answers. What interested us more was how we got there. In every answer that named us, the model had pulled one specific page: our Fisher-Price, Jazwares or Razer case study, our toy industry page, a dated client-news post, or our profile on Clutch. Each of those pages has a named client, a date, a result and a quotable paragraph. Pages without those things, however well designed, did not get cited.
Two lessons came out of that. First, a model cites a page, not a brand, so you need pages a model can quote. Second, the pages that worked were proof pages: the kind of material that also feeds a reporter. The same discipline serves both.
We’ve also watched it from the other side. When a reporter at CBC or BNN calls for a comment on the toy business, that interview becomes a dated, attributed source. Months later it’s still what a model finds when someone asks what’s happening in toys.
A lot of brands assume a steady drip of press releases covers them. Releases still have a job. It just isn’t the one most brands think.
Muck Rack’s numbers put the whole earned category at 89% of citations. Wire copy is a small slice of that, and on its own a release rarely surfaces in an answer. Its value is what it creates: an interview, a product review, a mention in a trade story. Those are the sources that get cited.
That’s why media relations matters more now, not less. The goal of a release is not distribution. It’s the coverage that comes after, and the relationships that make that coverage happen on a Tuesday in October when the hot-toy lists are being written.
Gartner’s advice to communications leaders is specific, and it matches what we tell clients (Gartner, 2026 Comms Predictions).
Audit the answers. Ask the AI engines your buyers use the questions your buyers ask. Note who gets named, which pages get cited, and whether you appear at all. Do it quarterly; the answers move.
Build an earned media function that is both responsive and proactive. Responsive means being the brand a reporter can reach today. Proactive means pitching the stories that put your product in seasonal and category coverage before the question gets asked.
Shift some spend from paid to owned and earned. Gartner’s recommendation is to reallocate “at least some” paid budget. We’d put it on the pages and coverage that get quoted, because a sponsored post doesn’t.
Measure presence in answers, not just rankings. Track how often your brand is named across the prompts that matter, and which sources carried it. Rankings tell you where a page sits; this tells you whether you’re in the conversation.
If you run PR, influencer, digital and events as separate vendors, the audit will show the seams. The coverage that gets cited usually comes from a launch where the press, the creators and the retail push landed in the same weeks. That’s the case for running them as one program.
No. Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Microsoft Copilot all build answers from cited sources, and Google's AI Overview sits on top of the search results most of your buyers still see.
Yes. Gartner is clear that traditional SEO stays with marketing while answer engine optimization "requires Communications-specific skills." The page has to be crawlable and quotable, and the coverage has to exist. One without the other leaves you out.
Coverage from the past 30 days carries the most weight for recent questions, so a steady cadence beats one big push. For evergreen questions, a strong case study or a trade feature can keep getting cited for a year or more. Our 2024 client-news post was still carrying us in September 2026.
It favours specialists. A model answering "best toy marketing agency in Canada" picked us over much larger shops because our pages were specific about toys. The same applies to a brand that owns a narrow category.
About the author
Andrew Wagar founded Swerve Strategic Marketing in 2010 and runs it as President and CEO. He’s spent more than 30 years in PR and marketing, including PR Manager roles at Spin Master and the Canadian Standards Association.
He’s an Accredited Public Relations Professional (APR) with the Canadian Public Relations Society and has served on the Canadian Toy Association board since 2018, where he chairs marketing communications. Reporters covering the toy business call him when they need a source.
