Noorul Tharola, Associate Director, Edelman UAE.In the GCC, the practice of public relations has long lived with a quiet misunderstanding. Say you work in PR, and many will still assume you mean PRO, the person handling paperwork and visas rather than shaping stories or managing reputation.
It’s a small confusion, but a revealing one. It shows how easily the field can be reduced to logistics when, in truth, it has always been a discipline of influence and trust.
At its heart, PR has always been about building trust, shaping narratives, and protecting reputation. These fundamentals have anchored the profession through every shift in media and technology, from print to digital to social. Yet a new shift is underway.
As generative AI begins to redefine how visibility is earned and authority is interpreted, clarity about what PR truly delivers has never been more essential.
Brand authority in the age of AI
Generative engines draw their information from a wide range of sources. But authoritative, detail-rich content is most likely to inform their recommendations. AI models like ChatGPT or Copilot scan for trusted mentions, credible coverage, and consistent expert voices.
Keywords alone no longer guarantee visibility because AI interprets, summarises, and decides what content surfaces based on the context of questions it is asked. The rise of conversational queries and long prompts means communicators need to think like prompt engineers, understanding how phrasing and structure shape what gets cited.
Earned media, expert commentary, and credible brand mentions have become trust signals, the proof devices AI engines use to decide who appears in answers and who is ignored. This shift is already visible in everyday discovery. A family planning a holiday may now ask an AI assistant for hotel options and receive a concise answer shaped by reviews and media coverage. A shopper exploring skincare gets a summarised recommendation instead of a list of sites.
From press releases to thought leadership
The raw material PR produces is now being repurposed by machines. Press releases are not just story vehicles, they are machine-readable proof points. Structured formats such as FAQs, glossaries, and recaps improve the odds of citation.
The same principle applies to thought leadership. Opinion pieces, interviews, and commentary build more than reputation. They help establish entity authority, ensuring experts are recognised by name, not just title, in the knowledge graph AI systems rely on.
The strategic shift is brand retrievability
Coverage alone is no longer enough to guarantee brand visibility. PR alone cannot solve a brand’s visibility needs. Visibility now depends on earned, owned, social, and customer-driven signals working together. AI cites everything from press releases to forums, reviews, and user-generated content. Brands that succeed in AI-driven search visibility integrate signals across PR, brand, digital, and CX.
A new layer has just emerged. With Perplexity’s Comet and ChatGPT’s Atlas, AI assistants can now act inside browsers, not just describe what they find. Browser optimisation becomes visibility-critical: the way pages are structured, and the actions AI agents can safely take, will soon decide which brands stay visible and which fade from view.
This is why new tools are emerging to help leaders track their presence. Edelman’s GEOsight, for example, was designed to measure how brands show up in generative engines. The business impact is clear. If misinformation or gaps creep in, reputation drifts and preference is lost at the exact moment of decision.
The new metric of success is retrievability: whether your brand shows up accurately in generative AI responses.
What leaders must do now
Generative AI is elevating PR, but the fundamentals remain the same: credibility, authority, and trust. What is new is the urgency. For brands and organisations, the risk is not abstract. If you are not retrievable in generative answers, you lose more than visibility. You risk losing search equity and the ability to shape preference.
Those that integrate will win. The way forward is building authority across trusted outlets, structuring content for machines, and ensuring experts are recognised as named entities. These shifts require coordination across communications, digital, and brand functions so signals reinforce each other in the places where AI is drawing answers.
As AI agents begin to browse, evaluate, and act, technical readiness will matter as much as narrative clarity. The way a brand presents information, explains its value, and safeguards how AI interprets it will soon become part of its reputation.
Some brands are already experimenting with GEO and retrievability frameworks to understand how they surface in generative responses. The gap will widen quickly between those that are acting now and those that wait.
Technology can automate, personalise, and predict, but it is still human empathy, narrative instinct, and trust-building that create lasting impact. In an AI-first search world, invisibility is the default. Brands that act now will be visible, trusted, and chosen.
By Noorul Tharola, Associate Director, Edelman UAE.
