AI is changing how people find and engage with content – but the core signals that drive visibility haven’t changed.
This article shows how search marketers can stay competitive by combining proven SEO and content strategies with AI-powered workflows to build authority, trust, and reach across platforms.
Why authority still wins in the age of AI search
If you work in marketing, you’ve probably heard the same questions repeated throughout the past year:
- “What’s AI’s impact on organic search?”
- “How can my brand appear in AI-driven search results?”
- “Is it safe to use AI in my content workflow?”
While many agencies and experts are rushing to stake a claim in the new frontier of “AI brand visibility,” industry leaders are aligning around the idea that search engine and AI optimization rely on similar signals.
Whether you’re using Google or ChatGPT, both platforms strive to surface the most authoritative, relevant content on a given subject.
They do this by identifying which entities (brands or sources) have provided robust subject matter expertise (contextual relevance) backed by strong third-party authority signals (e.g., citations from trusted sources).
In other words, the fundamentals that make your content rank highly on Google – expertise, authority, and trustworthiness – also increase your visibility in AI-generated answers.
If you’ve paid attention to effective content marketing strategies over the last decade, keep creating unique, valuable, educational, and engaging brand content enriched with proprietary data and expert insights.
This approach:
- Builds credibility and provides fresh expertise beyond what AI alone can produce, which all channels seek to surface.
- Earns coverage and citations from authoritative sources across diverse platforms.
- Strengthens your brand’s authority, diversifies visibility, and drives qualified traffic and cross-channel conversions.
Meanwhile, if you’re simply using ChatGPT to churn out regurgitated content for top-funnel informational queries – you might as well burn your marketing budget.
In 2025, it’s critical not to get lost in another “SEO is dead, long live […AI]!” echo chamber.
We’re 14 years into this recurring, sensationalized industry news cycle, yet search interest is still growing.
If we slow down and look at the facts, Google now processes over 5 trillion searches per year (with a 20%+ YoY growth).
AI tools like ChatGPT are expanding search behavior, not replacing it.
Up to 70% of ChatGPT prompts involve collaborative, custom tasks like code debugging or meal planning, per a recent Semrush study.
These are things classic search wasn’t built for.
Regardless of what we dub this era of “AI optimization,” one thing remains true: the value of cross-channel, inbound marketing reigns supreme, as it has since the dawn of digital.
While we don’t always need a new industry buzzword, generative engine optimization (GEO) has grown in interest significantly over the last 12 months.
Agency goliaths are starting to invest in their own content strategies around it.
Most brand channels rely on similar ranking principles.
So, instead of panicking about the latest platform shifts, challenge your team to pause and reflect.
How do you use AI to scale effective, cross-channel marketing strategies and workflows to sustain your brand’s visibility?
Specifically:
- How are we building content ecosystems that establish topic authority while earning trust and driving engagement across multiple platforms?
- Have we done audience research to understand where our target market resides, and are we effectively using AI to scale cross-channel content syndication to those platforms?
- Where else should we seek to apply AI to automate our proven marketing workflows to improve efficiency, reach, and ROI?
Here’s how my agency uses prompt engineering, custom GPTs, and proprietary AI agents to streamline digital marketing – and how your team can, too.
1. Using AI to create newsworthy campaigns with strong E-E-A-T
One of the highest ROI activities your brand can invest in now is proprietary research that produces insights AI can’t replicate.
This type of content gets cited by publishers, builds domain expertise, and increases your chances of influencing AI training data itself.
You don’t need to build bleeding-edge agentic workflows to see real impact from AI in your marketing.
Even teaching your team simple prompt engineering and having them build custom GPTs can help streamline your workflows.
AI can handle tedious tasks – like deep research and data analysis – so your team can spend more time on strategy and creative thinking.
Below are a few examples of AI-enhanced content workflows any brand can adopt.
Reactive PR campaign prompts
Use AI to research and brainstorm campaign ideas based on breaking news that aligns with the brand’s vertical and target market.
For example, you might prompt ChatGPT to take on a digital PR persona tasked with scanning breaking news in your industry from the past 24-72 hours and generating timely campaign ideas.
This kind of AI-assisted brainstorming ensures your content ideas are timely and poised to earn media attention without waiting for time-intensive human research and ideation sessions.
Sample prompt
- Role: You are a digital PR strategist for [Brand], tasked with identifying trending, high-authority news stories in [Topic/Industry/Region] from the past 24-72 hours and generating timely, data-driven campaign ideas that use the brand’s expertise to secure mainstream media coverage.
- Campaign criteria:
- Trend-driven: Focus on viral/trending topics from major outlets, TikTok, Reddit, X, Google Trends.
- Brand-relevant: Align with [Brand]’s domain expertise.
- Timely and actionable: Campaign can be executed within 24-72 hours.
- Data-backed: Use rapid methods – pulse surveys, social scraping, Google Trends, proprietary data.
- Emotionally compelling: Ideas must be timely, educational, emotional, or entertaining.
- Campaign structure:
- Title: A concise, engaging campaign title.
- Description: Explain the campaign idea, key insights/questions, target audience, and tie to current news + brand’s expertise.
- Methodology: Outline how you will gather and analyze data (e.g., surveys, social scraping, government datasets, trends).
Dig deeper: Reactive PR and AI: How to capitalize on trending topics faster
Data journalism campaign prompts
Consider training a custom AI model on your own archive of successful content marketing campaigns (or case studies from your industry) to generate fresh campaign ideas.
An internal ideation agent could be fed thousands of past campaign briefs, articles, or link building projects along with their performance outcomes.
The AI can then generate new ideas tailored to your brand’s vertical, following patterns that historically earned high authority backlinks and engagement.
You might guide it with criteria. For instance, the idea must:
- Have a high likelihood of attracting authoritative .edu/.gov/.com links.
- Be data-driven and unique.
- Align with your business goals.
- Be timely or seasonal.
- Include a visually engaging component.
This way, the AI isn’t pulling generic ideas from thin air – it’s remixing elements of proven hits to suggest the next big content piece.
Sample prompt
- Role: You are a creative data-driven PR strategist, tasked with generating newsworthy, high-authority campaign ideas that earn backlinks from top-tier media (.com), government (.gov), and educational (.edu) sites. You focus on creating unique, engaging, and data-backed campaigns tailored to [Brand]’s specific vertical (e.g., education, tax, aviation, hosting, creative industries).
- Campaign criteria:
- High-authority potential
- Data-driven
- Creative and unique
- Aligned with goals
- Timely
- Visually engaging
- Approved methodologies:
- Campaign structure:
- Title
- Description
- Methodology
Ideation scoring prompt
Another valuable use of AI is evaluating and refining newsworthy brand content at scale.
Marketing teams constantly brainstorm ideas for data journalism campaigns, blog posts, and social content.
Based on learned criteria, an AI agent can rapidly assess each idea for “newsworthiness” or virality potential.
For example, you can program an AI to act as an editorial panel that:
- Scores ideas on a scale for promotional viability.
- Suggests which statistics or angles would make the idea more compelling to the press.
- Even recommends how to execute the methodology more rigorously.
This doesn’t replace your decision-making, but it helps streamline a recurring process that has a proven framework that AI can help scale.
Sample prompt
- Role: You are a data journalism and PR expert tasked with evaluating the newsworthiness and promotional viability of data-driven campaign concepts, including surveys, studies, meta-rankings, and analyses. Your role is to rate the idea’s media potential, suggest the best promotional angles (headlines/takeaways), and refine the methodology to ensure data accuracy and media appeal.
- Evaluation process:
- Promotional viability score
- Potential headline-worthy takeaways
- Suggested name
- Methodology recommendation
Beyond these examples, dozens of other AI applications can streamline your content workflow.
Forward-thinking teams are deploying custom AI assistants for tasks such as:
- Writing survey questions.
- Building campaign briefs.
- Identifying typos or brand guideline violations.
- Discovering unique data sources or variables for new research.
- And so much more.
An AI agent can improve any repetitive or data-intensive part of content creation.
Once you’ve used AI to assist in creating high-quality, E-E-A-T-rich content, the next step is to ensure that the content gets in front of the right audience.
This is where AI can also play a game-changing role in distribution and PR.
2. Scaling digital PR with AI
Building your brand’s authority and trust through earned media has become more critical in an era of AI-driven search results.
Google’s algorithm and AI models prioritize widely cited and trusted content, favoring brands with strong E-E-A-T signals.
Digital PR helps secure high-authority backlinks and trusted media mentions that improve search rankings.
These efforts also increase the likelihood of being featured in AI-generated results, as LLMs are trained on well-cited, newsworthy sources.
In short, earning mainstream news and authoritative, niche-relevant brand coverage simultaneously strengthens your visibility across search, social, and emerging AI platforms.
AI holds enormous potential for PR teams. It can:
- Research journalists.
- Personalize outreach.
- Even draft pitches in seconds.
Still, we must pair scale with skill.
Relying too much on automation can lead to spammy, robotic pitches that journalists ignore (or resent).
Rather than blasting out “just another AI-generated pitch,” smart PR teams use an AI-powered, human-perfected workflow.
AI handles the heavy lifting – research, pattern-based tasks, and first drafts – while humans focus on strategy, messaging, and real relationship-building.
The key is scaling the repeatable parts with AI and reserving human effort for creativity, judgment, and authentic personalization.
Here are a few high-impact ways PR professionals can use AI today.
AI pitch strategy prompt
One of the easiest prompts to create is a digital PR strategy generator that mimics the pitch templates your team uses to earn authoritative brand coverage.
Incorporating training guides, sample pitch templates, industry pro tips, and other proprietary knowledge is crucial.
This is key to building a GPT or agent that helps your PR team stand out in a sea of sameness.
Below are the areas you should hone in and expand when designing a PR strategy prompt.
- Role: You are PPS savant, a digital PR Expert specialized in generating a complete pre-pitch strategy (PPS) for data-driven PR studies and media outreach. Your job is to extract the most compelling statistics from a provided study or campaign and generate a fully developed, press-ready outreach strategy, including subject lines, email copy, and a targeted media list.
- Distill:
- Compelling statistics
- Subject lines
- Email pitch structure
- Follow-up pitch structure
- Targeted media outlets
- Tone and focus
Media list builder
Finding the right outlets and contacts is a time-consuming part of PR that AI can dramatically improve.
Instead of manually searching media databases (or paying for expensive platforms that quickly go out of date), an AI-driven media list builder can scan recent articles and news to identify journalists and publications relevant to your content.
For example, given a summary of your campaign or a PDF of your research, an AI agent could compile a list of the 30–50 most relevant publishers and reporters, including:
- The outlet name.
- A link to a recent similar article (to prove relevance).
- The journalist’s name and beat.
- Even metrics like the outlet’s traffic.
This increases the odds of getting interest and saves thousands of dollars that might have been spent on static media databases.
Sample prompt
- Role: You are a digital PR publisher expert who analyzes brand studies to identify the 40 most relevant, high-authority news outlets based on the provided resource. Your focus is on matching the content (attached PDF) to vertical-specific, top-tier outlets and ensuring maximum relevance and link potential.
- Publisher recommendations should include:
- Publisher name
- Root domain (clickable URL)
- Vertical section (e.g., “All Finance”, “Lifestyle”, “Health”, “Education”, etc.)
- Domain authority (DA)
- Site traffic
- Relevant post
Blog search
Beyond mainstream media outlets, much of the “long tail” of PR success comes from niche blogs and industry influencers who syndicate or share your content.
Here, too, AI can make a huge difference.
To solve this, we built a “blog search agent” that runs a semantic search across 20,000+ active (non-spam) blogs from Kagi’s Small Web to help uncover niche-specific influencers who regularly update their smaller, mid-tier sites for highly relevant audiences.
By using AI in these ways, PR teams can significantly increase the speed and quality of their outreach, leading to more authoritative coverage.
Top brands already use these tactics to land stories in national newspapers and specialized trade publications.
More than algorithmic efficiency, effective PR requires credible, newsworthy content and authentic human relationships.
AI can help you write 10 pitches in the time it used to take to write one.
Still, if the core story isn’t strong or you haven’t bothered to personalize it, journalists will delete your email.
3. Streamlining social content syndication with AI
New search and social platforms will inevitably rise and fall.
However, one principle remains constant: marketers must repurpose and syndicate their best content across the diverse platforms where their audience engages.
In the age of AI, diversification is key for building defensible brand visibility and traffic.
A blog post that earns links and ranks on Google can be adapted into an X thread, a Reddit post, a LinkedIn article, a TikTok script, or a YouTube video.
Each extension reinforces your expertise and reaches new pockets of your audience.
Consistent cross-platform visibility boosts SEO and engagement and trains AI models to recognize your brand’s authority everywhere.
Many content teams excel at creating high-value content, but they often lack the bandwidth or distribution tools.
By automating parts of the syndication process and optimizing content for each channel, AI ensures your work actually gets seen.
Here are a few ways AI can amplify your cross-channel content strategy.
Reddit advice tool
With Reddit dominating the SERPs, it’s a crucial time to evaluate this social platform as another avenue for your content syndication.
This agent helps your social team:
- Identify relevant subreddits for your brand content.
- Develop suggested titles and justify why that style would resonate with each specific community.
- Generate article summaries to get you started.
AI image creation
AI is making creating eye-catching graphics, illustrations, or photos to accompany your content easier than ever.
That said, the jury is still out on the best models and prompts that can make or break your brand’s output.
A few of my personal favorites include DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which can produce custom images that were unimaginable a few years ago.
Still, the key difference is the quality of your prompt engineering.
Often, the best prompt designers are those with a creative eye, like graphic designers, who will know how to coax the model toward a desired style or factual accuracy.
The result: your content stands out in crowded feeds without the cost or time of a full photoshoot or graphic design cycle for every piece.
Dig deeper: How to create images and visuals with generative AI
Diversifying and repurposing content across channels is no longer optional. It’s essential for building a resilient brand presence.
AI makes this far easier by taking on the heavy lifting of format adaptation.
Your most valuable content assets can live multiple lives: a research report can spawn dozens of social posts, videos, and media pitches.
A single great insight can become an infographic, a blog, a webinar, and a Reddit AMA.
With AI handling the transformation and distribution at scale, you can ensure that no piece of content potential goes untapped.
The payoff is greater reach, more engagement, and a brand that appears ubiquitously wherever your audience (or the algorithms) might look.
AI tools and agents will transform 2025 marketing strategies and workflows
If there’s one overarching lesson in all of this, it’s that AI isn’t replacing great marketers – it’s amplifying their proven workflows and freeing up time for even greater innovation.
The brands that outpace their competition in the next 1–3 years will use AI to scale proven marketing workflows.
Humans will stay relentlessly focused on driving creativity, building community, and establishing trust.
Forward-thinking teams are already investing in comprehensive AI toolkits that touch every aspect of marketing:
- Content research and clustering.
- Content optimization.
- Digital PR outreach.
- Technical SEO analysis.
- Social media scheduling.
- Sentiment analysis.
- And much more.
These early adopters recognize that nearly every marketing workflow will have some element that AI can improve.
By experimenting now, they’re building a foundation of AI-augmented processes that will be standard practice for everyone else a few years later.
The message for marketing leaders is clear: don’t wait.
- Encourage your team to pilot AI in different parts of your operation and see what boosts your efficiency or results.
- Create internal case studies of what works (and share these insights with peers, contributing to industry knowledge).
Remember, the goal isn’t to hand everything over to machines. It’s to let machines do what they’re great at so that humans can do what they’re great at.
The winning formula is AI + human, not AI vs. human.
In 2025 and beyond, success in SEO and cross-channel marketing will come down to this balance.
The hype cycles will continue – new tools, algorithms, and platforms – but the fundamentals remain.
- Know your audience.
- Create real value.
- Earn trust.
- Be everywhere your audience is looking.
AI is simply the newest (and arguably most powerful) set of tools to help you execute on those fundamentals at scale.
Those who embrace these tools thoughtfully will:
- Safeguard their brand’s visibility.
- Reclaim precious time to focus on strategy and big ideas.
- Foster the human connections that truly build brands.
And that’s a winning playbook, no matter how search evolves.
Bottom line?
AI will boost your growth strategy if you don’t shy away from being an innovator on the technology adoption curve.
Your 2025 brand goal is simple.
- Repurpose your most valuable content to achieve cross-channel brand visibility, authority, and engagement where your target market resides.
- Hedge against the rapidly evolving AI landscape that will reshape consumer behavior over the next 12-36 months.
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