AI’s Role in Content Development and Its Implications on SEO
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Author: Ed Owen, PR Account Director at UMM
I’m re-watching Mad Men, and there’s a moment that’s stuck with me. Don Draper, sat in a presentation and facing an unconvinced client, does something bold. Given the opportunity to fight for advertising’s worth – his bread and butter, no less – he declines, and moves to close the meeting. The client is shocked, but Don is unmoved. His point? It works if you believe it works. If you don’t, it isn’t something you can be talked into.
As a comms professional in my mid-30s, I’ve thought about this scene more than is probably healthy. I’ve certainly watched Mad Men exactly as many times as you’d assume. It’s six, by the way. Six times. But the reason I think about this scene? It’s the parallels with PR services, which we’re proud to offer here at UMM. I don’t fully agree with Don – people absolutely can be PR converts – but there’s something in that vagueness that stuck with me.
PR is the discipline that never quite got the memo about measurement. Social media has its dashboards. Influencer marketing, the new(er) kid on the block, already has its own granular arithmetic. And PR has… well. It depends how you hold it up to the light. We count coverage, readership, domain authority, and the audience makeup of where that coverage lives.
Somewhere near the top of the marketing funnel sits the discovery phase, and that’s our patch. It’s the work of developing content that ensures the brand is already there, in the pages and the feeds, at the exact moment someone starts to go looking for its services. It matters. It is also maddeningly hard to prove its ROI. There’s always been a level of belief involved – clients either see and embrace the value of this type of content, or spend more on the sales team instead.
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We can gesture at sentiment, at share of voice, at potential online and print readerships. There’s an entire industry devoted to explaining what those numbers mean and how developed content is affecting purchasing behaviour. But at the end of it all, it’s all motivated by how we can turn belief into something more concrete.
SEO – Provable and Reliable
For years, SEO was the closest thing PR had to a commerciality barometer. Where does the client rank, against whom, for the searches that matter? Walking into a meeting and pointing at a first-page result, driven by good PR and content, was one of the genuine pleasures of the job. I’m five foot nine and would have liked to be six foot. But I was never taller than when I could show how a client had been dragged up the search rankings.
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Even so, PR, and by extension PR content, could feel like a ghost ship – drifting past the other disciplines, unmoored, running on vibes. But SEO brought it a little closer to the rest of the family, aligning the storytelling PR offers with what the brand actually wants to rank for, and the questions already ferrying readers to its site. Good PR content can be conjured out of nothing, but the best content? It needs this sort of insight.
How AI Changed the Game
And then, as tends to happen, AI rearranged the furniture. I’ve written about this before, but less about SEO, and more about how its rise has affected thought leadership. There’s also centaurs. More centaurs than you’d think. Give it a read!
Alright, back to it. The thing to understand about Google’s AI Overviews and the rise of zero-click search is how it changed the rules of the game. It used to be enough to rank on page one. Now, if a brand isn’t inside that AI-generated summary sitting above everything else, the click-through to its site falls off a cliff.
Authoritas found that pages once ranked first can shed 79% of their traffic when they land below an AI overview. For a brand’s potential customers, it turns out a single answer beats being offered ten or twenty – even with accuracy concerns baked in. Ahrefs reports that the brands earning the most web mentions surface in AI overviews up to ten times more often than the next tier down, and Victorious found that 90% of brands have no AI search presence at all.
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For anyone in content development, that last figure is both a warning and an opportunity.
Traditional SEO content practices, where keywords would be scattered through copy like breadcrumbs for Google’s crawlers, has given way to a new acronym – GEO, or generative engine optimisation. To be visible now, a brand has to be cited and recommended by the large language models themselves, whether that’s Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot or Claude. The models send out programs to read the web, process it, and decide who counts as an authority worth citing and repeating when someone asks it a question.
So how do you become someone worth citing? Authoritatively, and without falling back on corporate marketing-speak. You cite trusted sources. You quote real experts. You write in plain, matter-of-fact terms that demonstrate, in unshowy language, why this brand deserves to be treated as the expert.
This sends you back, usefully, to the first principles of content writing – who is the client’s audience, what do they care about, and why do they care. With Roy Morgan now counting 58% of Australians over 14 – some 13.6 million people – as AI tool users, this is not a part of comms strategy anyone can afford to gloss over.
Earning Expertise
There’s also the question of where the content lives, which is where PR and good writing truly complement each other. Earned media – coverage in someone else’s title – is what the models treat as proof. And it’s not just about getting into the largest publications, helpful though that is. Land in an array of specialist publications with good domain authority, and the LLM extends you the same credibility – an expert by association, objective in a way a brand’s own site can never quite be.
On this, a collation of studies by AuthorityTech suggests 82 to 95% of AI citations come from earned media. Owned media still counts – that remaining 5 to 18% can be the difference between you and a competitor being cited – and though the balance isn’t close, the same rules govern both when developing content. Namely, avoid corporate jargon and directly answer the questions your audience is actually asking, especially about how the product works. Is this genuinely news? Would a magazine’s readers care? If you can’t answer that, start again. Work backwards from earned media angles, and you can unearth compelling owned media content too.
What Good Looks Like
Consider Wealth Within, the Australian share-trading educators we work with. When someone goes hunting for a trading course, our sustained presence for them in high-authority national titles such as The Guardian and News.com.au, alongside steady coverage in the specialist press – Money Magazine, Hot Copper, The Market Online – means they surface near the top of both Google and the LLMs on the subject of share trading. This isn’t tied to a single press release, and Wealth Within won’t disappear after a news cycle, here today, gone tomorrow. They’re there in the LLM and on Google Overviews, with a curated presence we’re constantly reinforcing through our PR.
Which returns us, in the end, to Don Draper and belief. Except that belief can now be clearly expressed through GEO, as something that can be charted. When a customer enters the discovery phase, the brand is already waiting for them. Presence on Google Overviews or an LLM is a measurable outcome, a fresh road to the audience, and a road that is only going to get busier. PR spent a long time asking to be believed. Now we can show them the receipts.
Want to find out more? Contact us today.
