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How the rise of LLMs is fundamentally changing what it means for a brand to be visible - and what communications teams need to do about it.
Questions this article answers:
Something has changed in how people look for information - and it happened faster than most brands were ready for. A growing share of business decision-makers, founders, and consumers are not opening Google to begin their research. They are typing questions into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude. They want a direct answer, not a list of ten links to wade through.
This shift is not gradual. Gartner, in its latest roadmap for communications leaders, recorded exponential year-on-year traffic growth for consumer chatbot services between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025. The research firm forecasts that by 2027, the mass adoption of public LLMs as a replacement for traditional search will drive a two-times increase in PR and earned media budgets.
At Ellerton& Co., we are already seeing this play out in practice. Prospective clients now tell us they found us via Gemini or ChatGPT - not a Google search, not a referral. The question of how a brand surfaces in those AI responses is no longer theoretical. It is a live commercial issue.
When someone asks ChatGPT "What are the best PR agencies in Southeast Asia?" or "Which communications firm should I work with for a market entry into Vietnam?", the AI does not run a keyword search. It draws on patterns from the text it has been trained on - and it heavily weights content that signals credibility and authority.
Gartner identifies these as 'authority signals'. The inputs that LLMs prioritise when selecting sources to cite or recommend include editorial coverage in reputable publications, expert commentary attributed to named individuals, and trustedthird-party validation from analysts, journalists, or peers. Paid media does not carry the same weight. Gartner notes that AI search engines favour citing earned, shared, and organic owned content over paid.
"Unlike social media, where users scroll passively, or online media, where readers pick and choose what interests them, people approach ChatGPT with a specific problem or intent. They view the AI as a trusted advisor rather than a search engine. For PR professionals, this means our role is no longer just broadcasting; it is ensuring our clients are the solutions the advisor recommends." - Oliver Ellerton, Ellerton & Co., quoted in Provoke Media
In short: if your brand has not been written about in credible publications, if your spokespeople are not being quoted by journalists, and if there is no meaningfulthird-party commentary about what you do - you will not appear in AI responses. Or worse, you will appear inaccurately.
Two terms are gaining traction in communications circles. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that AI systems can easily extract and cite it when responding to user queries. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)refers more broadly to codifying practices that feed high-authority signals to LLMs.
Gartner describes AEO as work that requires communications-specific skills - not purely technical or SEO expertise. This is significant. It positions PR practitioners, who understand how to build narrative authority across media channels, as the people best placed to execute this work.
The practical implications include: mapping your brand narratives to priority publications and journalists, tagging earned coverage by source quality and topical relevance, building a consistent thought leadership programme for senior spokespeople, and monitoring how your content surfaces in LLM-generated summaries. These are not new PR skills. But they are now doing additional structural work - feeding the AI systems that are becoming the primary interface between brands and their audiences.
This is the question we get asked most often now. A prospect runs their company name through ChatGPT and nothing comes back - or something inaccurate does. A competitor appears prominently in AI responses and they do not. The gap feels arbitrary, but it is not.
LLMs do not browse the internet in real time (with some exceptions). They generate responses based on patterns learned from vast amounts of text - and crucially, the weight they assign to that text is not equal. Content from high-authoritysources, cited frequently by other credible sources, carries significantly more influence than content from low-authority or rarely-referenced sources. This is why the answer to getting your brand referenced by AI is, at its core, an earned media problem.
The starting point is identifying which outlets in your sector and geography carry genuine authority. In Southeast Asia, this varies by industry. For financial services it might be the Business Times, Bloomberg, or the Edge. For technology it could be Tech in Asia, KrASIA, or e27. For broader business audiences, the Straits Times, Nikkei Asia, and South China Morning Post all carry significant weight. Getting your brand and spokespeople featured - not just mentioned in passing, but substantively quoted and attributed - in these outlets is the most direct path to AI visibility.
One placement in a high-authority outlet will do more for your AI discoverability than ten pieces of owned content on your own website. LLMs are, in effect, running a form of peer review on the sources they cite. Third-party editorial validation is the signal that matters.
AI systems learn to associate names and brands with topics through repetition. A CEO who is quoted once on supply chain resilience is a data point. A CEO who is quoted twenty times across multiple credible publications on supply chain resilience becomes, in the AI's understanding, an authority on the subject - someone worth surfacing when a user asks about it.
This is why thought leadership programmes have a compounding effect that single press releases do not. The goal is not one good placement; it is building a body of attributed commentary that LLMs can draw on consistently. Spokespeople who engage regularly with journalists, speak at conferences that generate press coverage, and contribute to publications in their own name are the ones whose brands surface in AI responses.
LLMs extract meaning from text in specific ways. Content that makes clear claims, uses consistent terminology, names specific people and organisations, and provides concrete facts or data points is easier for AI systems to parse and cite accurately. Vague brand language - phrases like 'best-in-class solutions' or 'industry-leadinginnovation' - does not give LLMs anything useful to work with. Content that says 'we helped Company X reduce customer acquisition costs by 30% in Vietnam over 12 months' does.
This applies to press releases, website copy, case studies, and any content that may be indexed. The cleaner and more specific the claims, the more usable that content is as a source. Consistency of terminology also matters - if your company is described differently across different publications and platforms, LLMs may struggle to consolidate that into a coherent understanding of who you are.
Editorial coverage is the most powerful signal, but it is not the only one. Industry analyst mentions, awards and rankings from credible bodies, academic or research citations, and positive references from partners or customers in their own published content all contribute to the overall authority picture. LLMs draw on a wide range of source types, and a brand that appears across multiple credible contexts - not just press releases - builds a more robust AI footprint.
In practical terms, this means pursuing analyst briefings, submitting for relevant industry awards, encouraging clients to reference your work in their own communications, and building genuine partnerships with organisations that carry their own authority. Each of these creates an additional reference point that AI system scan draw on.
Before addressing gaps, you need to know what they are. Run your brand name through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude with a range of relevant queries. Ask the kinds of questions your target customers would ask: 'Who are the leading PR agencies in Southeast Asia?', 'Which communications firm should I use for a market entry into Indonesia?', 'Who can help me with crisis communications in Singapore?' Note whether your brand appears, what it says, which competitors appear instead, and whether any of the information is inaccurate.
This audit is the foundation of an AI visibility strategy. It tells you which topics you need stronger coverage on, which publications you need to be in, and where your narrative is being misrepresented or simply absent. It is also a useful benchmarking exercise to repeat every quarter, as AI training data and retrieval systems are not static.
For years, there has been an internal debate in many marketing teams about how much to invest in earned media versus paid channels. Paid is trackable, controllable, and scalable. PR is harder to attribute and takes longer to build. The ROI question was always present.
The LLM era shifts that calculation considerably. Paid advertising does not feed intoAI-generated responses in the same way that editorial coverage does. When a journalist at the Financial Times or the Straits Times cites your CEO on a market trend, that creates a data point that LLMs will draw on when forming their understanding of your brand. A sponsored post does not do the same thing.
Gartner identifies earned media as 'a core input to AI-driven discovery and reputation', effectively repositioning PR from a peripheral awareness tool into the primary engine for search visibility. This is a structural argument, not a softer one about brand prestige.
For brands operating in Southeast Asia, this has specific implications. The region's media landscape is fragmented across languages, regulatory environments, and cultural contexts. Building genuine authority here requires on-the-ground relationships with journalists across Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand - markets that each have their own tier-one outlets and editorial priorities. An LLM trained on regional content will reflect these distinctions.
There is an underappreciated risk that deserves direct attention. When a brand has thin media coverage, LLMs may fill that gap with inaccurate or incomplete information. AI systems do not flag uncertainty in the same way a journalist might. They generate confident-sounding responses based on whatever signals are available.
"Based on our experience at Ellerton & Co.,conversational PR is shifting toward a model where the quality of the narrative is more important than ever. We are doubling down on creating great stories for readers, viewers, and listeners across the region because LLMs are increasingly sophisticated at identifying and citing high-authority sources." - Oliver Ellerton, quoted in Provoke Media
A brand that has been consistently present in credible media, whose spokespeople have been quoted accurately on relevant topics, and whose narrative has been shaped through deliberate thought leadership, is far less vulnerable to AI misrepresentation. The brand with sparse or low-quality coverage is not neutral in AI responses - it is simply more likely to be described incorrectly or ignored altogether.
There is also the issue of brand safety in AI-generated content. As Oliver Ellerton noted in Provoke Media, if an AI generates inappropriate or inaccurate content that references your brand, the reputational damage is real regardless of whether your team had any hand in it. Proactive narrative management is a form of insurance against this.
The shift toward AI-mediated discovery does not make PR work easier. It raises the bar. Volume of press releases is not the metric that matters. What matters is the quality and authority of the sources carrying your story, the consistency of your narrative across markets and over time, the depth of your spokespeople's commentary, and the relevance of your content to the questions your prospective customers are actually asking AI systems.
Not all agencies are building these capabilities. The questions worth asking a prospective PR partner include: How do you measure the impact of earned media on AI discoverability? Which publications in our target markets carry the most authority with LLMs? How do you structure content for generative engine optimisation? Do you monitor how our brand surfaces in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity responses?
These are not yet standard questions in every pitch meeting. But they will be.
Southeast Asia presents a particular challenge and opportunity in this context. The region's digital economy is projected to reach US$1 trillion by 2030. It is one of thefastest-growing regions in the world for AI adoption. And yet its communications landscape is genuinely complex - eleven countries with different languages, regulatory environments, political contexts, and media ecosystems.
LLMs reflect the content they have been trained on. If a brand's narrative is primarily present in English-language global media, it may surface well when someone asks ChatGPT a question in English about the sector - but poorly when the query is in Bahasa Indonesia or Tagalog, or when the AI draws on regional publications that have a different view of the market.
Building authority in Southeast Asia requires more than a centralised content strategy pushed out across markets. It requires local media relationships, culturally appropriate messaging, and spokespeople who can speak credibly to regional journalists. The AI systems that your prospects are using to find answers are, increasingly, synthesising all of this. A PR agency with genuine regional presence is not a nice-to-have - it is how you ensure your narrative is part of the synthesis.
"The misconception that ASEAN is a single, unified market is a significant barrier. This region comprises 11 countries with different political, cultural, linguistic and regulatory realities." -Oliver Ellerton, quoted in Campaign India
If you are a marketing director, CMO, or communications lead trying to work out where to begin, a few concrete steps are worth considering.
First, run some searches. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity the questions your target customers would ask when looking for a brand like yours. See what comes back. Is your brand present? Is the description accurate? Are your competitors better represented? This audit will tell you more about your current AI visibility than most analytics dashboards.
Second, look at the sources the AI cites. The publications, analysts, and commentators that appear in those responses are the authority signals that matter. If your brand has thin coverage in those outlets, that is the gap your PR strategy needs to address.
Third, evaluate your thought leadership programme. Are your senior spokespeople consistently quoted in credible media on topics that matter to your audience? If not, this is where to focus. An executive who is regularly cited by trusted journalists is an asset that compounds over time - in human search results and in AI responses.
Fourth, brief your PR agency - or prospective agencies - on this specific challenge. Ask them how they approach AEO and GEO. Ask them how they measure earned media authority. If they cannot answer these questions with confidence, that is useful information.
The rise of LLMs is not a threat to PR - it is the strongest argument for PR investment that the industry has had in years. The mechanics of AI-driven search actively reward the work that good PR agencies do: building media authority, developing credible spokespeople, and placing high-quality stories in trusted publications.
What has changed is the stakes. A brand that invests in earned media and narrative authority is not just building awareness - it is shaping the answers that AI systems give when your prospects come looking. A brand that does not is leaving that to chance.
At Ellerton& Co., we have been building communications infrastructure across Greater Southeast Asia for a decade. If you want to understand how your brand currently appears in AI-generated responses - and what it would take to improve that - we would be glad to have that conversation.
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About Ellerton & Co. Public Relations
Ellerton & Co. is one of Southeast Asia's leading independent public relations and integrated communications agencies. Headquartered in Singapore with teams across Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Japan, and Hong Kong, the agency helps brands build visibility and authority across Greater Southeast Asia's most dynamic markets.
Get in touch: growth@ellerton.sg
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