The new imperative for PR & Comms teams: Earning your place in AI answers

When someone asks an LLM about your sector, or which organisations are leading the way on the issues you work on, do you feature in the answer?

Journalists, policymakers, supporters, and consumers are much more likely to pose broader questions than ask about your organisation by name, so how can comms teams work on earning a place in AI answers?

Is anyone asking about you?

Considering what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity would say about your organisation when asked is a strong starting point for an AI strategy – outdated facts, resurfaced controversies, and models that tell different versions of your story are all real risks – but that assumes your intended audiences already know to ask about you. They might not, and if nobody has named you, then it’s up to the model to decide whether you belong in the answer.

That decision carries more weight than it used to. As Amy Chappell, Head of Insights Strategy at Vuelio, told our recent charity sector roundtable: ‘People are reading the synthesised answer, not the article. Reputation often now forms inside the AI response’.

And this isn’t just an issue for businesses – public bodies may not compete for customers, but they do compete to be the trusted source. First Rail London’s Communications Manager Dana Raer explained during our regulated industries webinar that auditing the main models is now a major part of her day-to-day role, because the public are asking AI questions about the London Overground – not the London Overground team themselves.

Why sector questions are harder to win

When a model answers a sector question, it isn’t recalling a ranked list, but instead weighs which organisations the wider body of evidence keeps pointing to. It builds confidence through corroboration.

During Vuelio webinar ‘AI as the new PR & comms stakeholder‘, Purposeful Relations PR Futurist and Co-founder Stuart Bruce described a university industrial dispute where AI answers were dominated by the union’s view. The union had left more traces for LLMs to pick up across its website, social channels, and in the media. As Stuart put it: ‘The trade union gave them half a dozen quotes. The university gave them one.’

The sources doing the corroborating aren’t always the ones comms teams prize most. When the Vuelio Insights team analysed how LLMs cited UK supermarkets for our report ‘The role of AI, LLMs, and earned media in shaping reputation‘, trade titles such as The Grocer did more of the work than national press titles. Models also tend to favour evidence that has built credibility over time, so fresh content helps most when it adds to an established footprint.

Winning a sector answer comes down to a consistent, specific, and well-corroborated presence in the conversations that make up your sector. Here are three habits to help:

1) Own a few category conversations rather than many

Spreading effort across every topic your organisation could comment on can leave a thin, unconvincing trail. A model is far more likely to name you where your spokespeople, data, owned content, and earned coverage all say the same thing.

Choose two or three conversations where you hold genuine authority, and concentrate there: research, expert commentary, FAQs on your own site, and trade outreach, all sharing the same information. Substance is what is useful to LLMs. As Ngaire Crawford, Executive Director of AI Strategy at Vuelio, says, coverage needs to ‘help answer the question with clear facts and validated endorsement’.

Knowing which conversations to focus on is where Lumina AI View can help, highlighting which conversations you’re already earning a place in versus those a competitor currently owns.

2) Find which stories in your sector are gaining ground

The stories building momentum in coverage today become the evidence base for AI answers. The earlier you contribute credibly, the more touchpoints you build before the narrative settles.

As Dr Anne Gregory, Professor Emeritus at the University of Huddersfield, shared during a Vuelio webinar: ‘Once a narrative is set, it becomes extremely difficult to counter. This is why PR must come in early’.

Lumina Stories & Perspectives is built for that early read. Instead of a stream of clips, it groups coverage into stories, shows which are gaining traction or fading, and reveals the perspectives and voices driving each one.

For public affairs teams, pairing this with Vuelio Political Monitoring shows when a story moves from the newsdesk to the committee room. Once you know which perspective you want to join, the Vuelio Media Database can help you reach the trade and specialist journalists already leading it.

3) Track targeted slices of your sector, not the whole thing

Asking AI about ‘healthcare’ or ‘local government’ will confirm what you already know: the biggest names dominate. The answers you can realistically win, and learn from, are more specific: adult social care in the North West, accessible rail travel in London, energy advice for renters.

AI View can be scoped by topic and by place, enabling your team to measure the conversations that actually shape your reputation. See your share of each conversation, not just whether you appear.

Measurement also has to be repeatable. A one-off check in your own ChatGPT account is coloured by your history and phrasing. AI View sends clean, unpersonalised queries to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, and builds a trend over time.

Why measurement tools need to be built for comms

Many AI visibility tools come from search and digital marketing, and focus on how often a brand gets mentioned – a narrower question than the one comms and public affairs teams are asked to answer. As Stuart Bruce said at our event ‘How AI is changing the way we communicate‘, tools from the PR space understand ‘the pressures, the trends, the type of information that we need to know’.

While comms teams can’t force an LLM to name their organisation, it is possible to find out which evidence is shaping answers, and what media coverage will be the most effective.

To see how your organisation shows up when AI is asked about your sector, get in touch about a Lumina AI View demo.