AI is killing your PR

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

😮AI is killing your PR -  The 12% of Media That Actually Shows Up in AI Answers

👨‍💻 LinkedIn and YouTube Roll Out Advanced Advertising Enhancements

🏆 Ad of the Day

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😮AI is killing your PR -  The 12% of Media That Actually Shows Up in AI Answers

Here’s the shift almost nobody in performance marketing has caught yet, and it’s quietly rewriting how brands become discoverable:

AI doesn’t learn from the internet. It learns from specific parts of the internet.

And only a tiny slice of earned media makes it into those training pipelines.

That means most PR wins, even the ones that look huge on LinkedIn, have zero impact on whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers.

This is why two brands with similar SEO and similar press can have wildly different visibility inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

One of them is getting referenced. The other is getting ignored.

Enter: GenAI Referenced Media, the new top tier of PR.

This isn’t a hype label. It’s a measurable category of outlets that AI systems repeatedly cite, reuse, and anchor into answers.

To qualify, an outlet must pass three filters, and this is where most PR strategies collapse:

1. It must sit inside authoritative data pipelines.

LLMs learn from indexed, structured repositories:

Google News → Factiva → LexisNexis → GDELT → syndicated wires.

If your feature isn’t inside these systems, AI rarely sees it. Millions of articles never touch these pipelines.

2. It must allow dofollow links.

This signal still matters because AI needs entity-to-topic anchoring.

If your placement uses “nofollow,” the models register the mention…but not the authority. This is the only place where PR and SEO strategically fuse.

3. The page must be structured for machine digestion.

Clear entities. Clean sections. Logical labeling. AI scrapes format before meaning. If the article is messy, you vanish from the training signal.

Here’s the interesting part:

GenAI Referenced Media isn’t about exposure. It’s about controlling the answer layer, the layer people see before they reach a Google result.

If your competitor owns more GenAI-referenced citations, they will show up in category answers even if your SEO is better. If your brand isn’t referenceable, you become invisible in AI search, even if humans see you everywhere.

This is the new moat.

SEO ranks pages. PR earns attention. But GenAI Referenced Media decides which brands get repeated.

And in a world where customers assemble certainty through AI summaries, not blue links, being the brand that gets repeated is everything.

👨‍💻 LinkedIn and YouTube Roll Out Advanced Advertising Enhancements

LinkedIn and YouTube are rolling out fresh ad features aimed at boosting visibility, engagement, and conversion across B2B and short-form environments. Both platforms are leaning into personalization, creator behavior, and AI to help advertisers reach buyers earlier and more efficiently.

The Breakdown:

1. Premium Placement - LinkedIn’s new Reserved Ads guarantee top-of-feed visibility across formats like video, thought leadership, and single image, giving brands predictable impressions and earlier-funnel dominance that competitors can’t easily match.

2. Smarter Creative - LinkedIn’s Ad Personalization adapts messages using a viewer’s name, title, industry, or company. AI Ad Variants generate instant copy variations, while next year’s Flexible Ad Creation will auto-mix images, videos, and text for optimized performance.

3. Interactive Shorts Ads - YouTube now allows comments on eligible Shorts ads, enabling real-time reactions and making ads feel native. Branded Shorts can also include creator-driven link-outs to brand websites, turning discovery into immediate action.

These updates give marketers more control over visibility, more relevance through personalization, and more efficiency via AI. LinkedIn improves top-of-funnel reach with guaranteed placement, while YouTube unlocks interactivity and conversion paths inside Shorts, a powerful combination for brands competing during peak demand.

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🎥 Ad of the Day

What Works:

1) Instant Belonging - The varsity-style lettering and football don’t just set a theme; they immediately tell your brain, “Oh, this is for people like me.” When an ad makes someone feel included before they even think, the product becomes secondary to the identity hit.

2) Memory Pull - Those team-colored belts tap straight into tailgates, cold bleachers, and yelling at refs with your friends. That emotional shortcut is powerful because you’re no longer evaluating a belt, you’re revisiting a feeling you already love.

3) Effortless Context - The belts sitting casually around a football look like someone tossed them on a table at a pregame party. That “real life” placement removes the salesy vibe and makes the product feel like part of the ritual, not a pitch.

It works because it doesn’t try too hard, it just taps into identity, memory, and belonging, and lets the viewer finish the story themselves.

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