AI Is Telling Every Brand's Story. Here's How Companies Are Shaping It

Using AI for Searching in Internet

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When a global technology company was looking for a way to manage its narrative in the market, its Chief Marketing Officer didn't start with a Google search. He asked an AI engine.

The recommendation that came back was for a public relations firm. The tech company hadn't considered PR, but based on the engine's detailed explanation, its CMO went from being relatively indifferent to practically pre-sold before picking up the phone.

After hearing the tech company’s challenge, Channel V Media's president Gretel Going agreed that her firm might not be the ideal match. Not only was their CMO not persuaded, he ended up expanding the scope of the engagement to get her to agree. The ironic ending: the partnership turned out to be exactly what the tech company needed. The AI engine, it seems, understood their requirements better than anyone in the room.

This is not how search ever worked. AI engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Claude don’t give people a list of links to evaluate on their own. They give them a fully formed narrative about a company, what it does, and how it fits the specific need they've described.

If a company isn't deliberate about shaping what AI engines say about it, AI assembles a narrative from whatever fragments it can find. Those responses are quickly becoming gospel for prospects, investors and consumers alike.

How AI Decides What to Say About Companies

According to a recent survey from my company, Prosper Insights & Analytics, more than half of Americans who use generative AI (53%) are using it to search the internet. This illustrates how quickly these tools are moving from novelty to daily habit.

For companies looking to influence how audiences perceive them, controlling what AI engines are saying has become an urgent priority. And one lever that has emerged as disproportionately powerful for doing so is earned media coverage.

For its recent report “Tapping into the Attention Economy,” Channel V Media asked the AI engines directly how much earned media influences their responses. ChatGPT reported that as much as 63% of its answers are derived from traditional media sources.

This is in part because traditional media outlets have editorial vetting built into their process. AI engines weigh third-party reporting about a company more heavily than what a company says about itself on its own website, where arguably any claim can be made. This is why, when the tech company CMO reference previously asked AI how to manage his company’s market narrative, it recommended he get serious about PR.

Gartner agrees, forecasting that PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. This growth will be driven by the mass adoption of AI and Large Language Models that are prioritizing credible third-party editorial content.

“The biggest shift we’re seeing right now isn’t just that people are searching a new channel for answers, it's that they deeply trust what comes back,” said Going. “This is completely different from traditional search, where someone has to sift through links and form an opinion. When they ask AI a question, they essentially receive a verdict. And most companies have no idea what verdict is being delivered on their behalf.”

A Look at How One Company Influenced its AI Narrative

A clear example comes from recent work by NeuroKaire, a precision psychiatry company whose blood tests help depressed individuals find the right antidepressant medication based on their unique biology, rather than enduring a frustrating trial-and-error process.

NeuroKaire had established its name within the healthcare industry and the business world but needed to reach the people who might actually benefit from their work: young Americans navigating their mental health largely on their own.

Knowing that this audience is increasingly looking to AI for guidance, NeuroKaire worked with Channel V Media to bring cultural relevance to an AI narrative that was otherwise clinical in nature.

Together they developed “The Self-Medication Generation,” a report based on consumer survey data from American adults. The findings revealed how depressed Americans are bypassing the traditional healthcare system and managing their depression through “DIY treatment stacks” assembled from cannabis, CBD, GLP-1s, digital health apps and peer recommendations, largely without professional guidance.

To appeal to Gen-Z adults specifically, Channel V Media built a number of narratives around how depression was affecting their everyday lives rather than framing the findings from a clinical distance. The firm coined the term “Quiet Coping,” a deliberate play on the widely documented workplace trend “Quiet Quitting,” to describe how Gen-Z’s struggle with depression is affecting them on the job.

They described the growing self-medication ecosystem as a “shadow pharmacopeia” to emphasize the parallel infrastructure emerging outside of the traditional healthcare system. And they drew attention to how depressed Gen-Zers are chasing the ‘perfect’ bodies through prescription weight loss drugs.

The media placement strategy was equally deliberate, targeting outlets that would deliver consumer-coded messages to AI engines and Gen-Z audiences directly. This included mainstream consumer outlets, cannabis trades, workplace reporters and niche publications. On launch day, they secured coverage in a handful of their target publications. This was followed by a feature in Vice that focused on the connection between depression and body image.

Within hours, three of the four major AI engines (ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity) were citing the report, based heavily on an authoritative outlet with under 30,000 monthly visitors. Even more telling, they were adopting the language. “Quiet Coping” appeared across multiple engines, and the concept of DIY “treatment stacks” became part of how AI described NeuroKaire’s findings.

Within two days of Vice publishing its article, NeuroKaire’s body-image angle appeared in AI responses from both Perplexity and Gemini. In twelve days, several net-new themes went from nonexistent to appearing across multiple engines.

Before the campaign, an AI query about NeuroKaire would have returned clinical language drawn from healthcare trades. After, the same engines were describing the company in the context of Gen-Z's lived experience..

"We didn't build this company to talk to other scientists about depression. We built it to reach the people living with it," says Dr. Daphna Laifenfeld, co-founder of NeuroKaire and Harvard-trained neuroscientist. “Increasingly, those people are turning to non-medical sources like AI engines to figure out what's wrong and what to do about it. If we're not part of that conversation in language they actually relate to, we're invisible to the audience that needs us most."

What Happens When Companies Don’t Show Up

NeuroKaire's results illustrate what's possible when a company is deliberate about its AI narrative. But for every company actively shaping the conversation, there are dozens that aren’t. Going argues that AI doesn't wait for companies to participate, and that’s dangerous.

"The biggest risk isn't that your company doesn't appear in these engines," says Going. "It's that it does, and what they're saying becomes entrenched while you’re not paying attention. We've seen companies discover that AI engines are confidently repeating outdated positioning, amplifying a competitor's framing, or surfacing a negative narrative that PR resolved years ago. Once that language is embedded, it takes deliberate, sustained effort to rewrite it."

Channel V Media has applied this approach across industries, from precision psychiatry with NeuroKaire to turning Sherweb, a recognized voice in the MSP space, into a cybersecurity authority.

Disclosure: The consumer sentiment study referenced above was conducted by my company, Prosper Insights & Analytics. This is the same dataset used by the National Retail Federation, and available from Amazon Web Services, Bloomberg, and the London Stock Exchange Group for economic benchmarking.