Why Your Client Needs to Show Up in AI Search (And How to Make It Happen)

There is a question every PR professional should be asking right now about their clients: if someone opened ChatGPT today and asked who the top experts are in your client's industry, would your client show up?

If the answer is uncertain, that is the opportunity. And the window to act on it is narrowing.

On a recent episode of Pitch, Please, Cassandra Morse and Faith Cedela broke down what the shift from traditional media coverage to AI visibility means for PR strategy, why the executive is becoming the most valuable brand asset a company has and how a single live session can fuel an entire content ecosystem.

The New Way People Find Experts

The research behavior that used to start with a Google search and end with a list of blue links looks completely different now. People are asking AI who the leaders are in a given industry. They are asking which companies they should talk to, who has the experience and who can actually be trusted.

"A lot of people don't realize they're asking AI," Cassandra said. "If you go and try to Google something, you get the AI overview. A lot of people just assume that's their search results."

The result is that there are entirely new places to show up that did not exist a year ago. A placement in a single article used to be a meaningful win. Now it is one signal among many that AI systems use to determine whether someone is worth surfacing. Repurposing real content in an executive's actual voice, consistently and across multiple platforms, does more for discoverability than a single feature ever could.

"You're not just getting clients coverage," Faith said. "You're building the digital authority that helps them get discovered."

The Executive Is the Brand

Corporate messaging is losing ground fast. Not because companies have stopped producing it, but because audiences have stopped responding to it the way they once did. What people want now is to know who understands the problem, who has lived through it and who they can actually trust.

"People connect with people, not logos," Faith said. "We've talked about this a lot."

The logical endpoint of that shift is that executives become the face of the brand in a way that used to be reserved for celebrity spokespeople. Faith pointed to a chip brand whose CEO appeared in their own commercial, speaking directly about the family farm origins of the product.

"Normally they don't want to be the face," she said. "And I was like, times are changing."

Cassandra sees this as the direction the whole industry is heading. Companies that are currently spending on influencer partnerships may find that turning their own executives into the go-to experts in their field delivers more long-term value than outsourcing credibility to someone with a following. Influencer marketing is already showing signs of decline as AI search reshapes how people find and evaluate information. The executive who shows up consistently, speaks on niche topics with genuine authority and engages in real conversations online is building something no influencer deal can replicate.

Why Live LinkedIn Changes Everything

A polished clip tells you what someone wants you to know. A live session shows you how they actually think.

"Live shows you how they think, what they think, how they're communicating, how they explain things, answering questions, their personality," Faith said. "It's huge."

The imperfection is part of what makes it work. A cat in the background, a thoughtful pause before answering, the occasional "um" — these are not flaws to edit out. They are the signals that tell an audience they are watching a real person with real experience, not a carefully managed corporate asset. Authenticity at that level is genuinely difficult to manufacture, which is exactly why it lands differently than anything a marketing team produces in post.

And the content return on a single live session is significant. One ten to fifteen minute conversation becomes clips, LinkedIn posts, articles, media pitches and material for podcast appearances. Cassandra and Faith said they noticed native content created by individuals consistently outperforms brand account posts, which means every live session an executive does is working harder than a company post ever could.

"You can take one live LinkedIn and turn it into like fifteen different posts," Cassandra said. "Repurpose it till you can't anymore and then find more creative ways to repurpose it."

The Goal Has Shifted

The old PR brief was: can we get our client featured? The new one is: can we make our client known for something?

Those are meaningfully different objectives and they require different strategies. Coverage is still valuable. Credibility is more valuable. Authority, the kind where AI surfaces your client's name when someone asks who the experts are in a given field, is the goal worth building toward.

Getting there requires knowing the client well enough to position them effectively. How do they communicate? Are they the type who can go deep on three questions or do they cover more ground with rapid-fire responses? What are they genuinely passionate about, because passion shows on camera in a way that no amount of preparation can fake. What topics do they have real authority on versus ones they Googled the night before?

"Coverage is great, credibility is better, authority is the goal," Faith said. "You have to get real creative to make this work."

The PR professionals doing this well right now are not just thinking about placements. They are thinking about how every piece of content, every live session, every article and every comment on a trending news story adds another signal to the ecosystem that tells AI, and the humans using it, that this person is worth paying attention to. That is the shift in executive branding that separates firms building real authority from the ones still chasing individual features.

If your client would not show up in an AI search for experts in their industry today, that is where the work starts.

Ready to build that kind of visibility for your executives? Let's talk.