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by Erik Carlson on Oct 13, 2026, 2:48:54 PM
Ask five people in marketing and public relations, “who owns measuring AI visibility?” and you'll probably get five different answers. There’s also a good chance most of them would say “our SEO team?” by default. Recent data backs this up.
A 2026 survey from Corporate Ink, a B2B PR agency, found that 47% of marketers think digital marketing and SEO teams should own AI visibility tracking, compared to just 17% for PR. As the CEO of Notified, and someone close enough to the data to personally create the SOAR Content Framework (PR’s leading framework for maximizing AI visibility) I have a strong aversion to handing over measurement to SEO teams as yet another marketing KPI. It’s backwards – and the reason comes down to what AI visibility actually requires.
I’m a firm believer that the function responsible for executing should own the reporting. AI visibility is fundamentally about managing an independent, third-party record and that's always been PR's job. To hammer the point home, more than 90% of AI citations are driven by owned and earned media... “hello PR.”
So, when people give their answers on the topic, here's mine: it shouldn’t even be a debate.
Why Should PR Own AI Visibility Measurement?
Two decades of SEO instinct does not transfer cleanly here, as AI search engines do not work the same way. A key University of Toronto study found these systems show a systematic and structural preference for earned, third-party validation that includes media coverage as well as forums and community sites like Reddit over what a brand says about itself.
That's not just a minor SEO tweak, it flips the old logic on its head. Whoever manages these third-party relationships and the structured facts underneath them ends up with the strongest claim to this category. I'd argue that's always been PR, it's just never had to say this out loud until now.
A recent real-world example proves that point. This Forbes Business Council piece from September 2026 described a company whose old restructuring story kept surfacing in AI summaries years after the fact, not because it was inaccurate, but because nothing had ever pushed it out of the record. AI systems kept treating it as current, and that's a record-integrity problem, not something better keywords fix. This work begins upstream, at the point where facts first get distributed, and we ran a test of this here at Notified.
Our research published in June 2026 analyzed more than 8,000 GlobeNewswire-distributed press releases and found that over 99% were cited by ChatGPT or Claude. That's an upstream input I keep coming back to: the trusted press release that seeds the narrative in the first place. Getting that right is editorial work, and it's what PR already does.
What Standard Should PR Meet Before Claiming AI Visibility?
I have to be honest here, because claiming this category means PR holding itself to a bar it hasn't always cleared.
PR practitioners have spent years insisting its metrics should tie to outcomes, not exposure. That same discipline needs to apply to AI visibility, starting now, and not get treated like a new category that earns a grace period just because it's unfamiliar.
This is a lesson the industry has been slow to learn before. Advertising value equivalency (AVE) was formally discredited by the Barcelona Principles back in 2010 and it still took years to actually disappear from practice. If that happens again here, showing up everywhere but proving nothing, PR will lose the claim before it's finished making it.
At least PR isn't starting from zero this time. AMEC, the international association for measurement and evaluation of communications, put out its GEO Principles in May 2026 and the IAB published its own guidelines in August 2026. Using what already exists is the credible path forward, rather than spending another year building something new when good work is already on the table.
In fact, AMEC board member James Crawford put it better than I could: "Visibility is not an outcome. Being mentioned is not the same as being trusted."
What Should PR Ask Its Measurement Providers?
Here's where I think this actually gets solved, not in a conference room debating whose department owns AI visibility, but in every conversation a PR team has with a vendor. If enough teams start asking the same hard questions, the standard stops being aspirational and starts being how the market works.
That's the part I want to push on publicly, not just for other providers, but for my company too. Before you trust any AI visibility number, put these four questions to your vendor.
- First, which AI engines does this cover and which ones does it not? A number built only on ChatGPT tells you nothing about how you're showing up in Claude or Gemini.
- Second, and this trips people up more than they'd expect: is this a citation inside a real answer, or just presence in an index somewhere? Those aren't the same thing, and providers that blur the line make their tools sound more capable than they are.
- Third, what exact content was measured, and can you trace the number back to it? Most vendors get vague right about here. If a provider can't show you that trail, I wouldn't put much weight on the number they're handing you.
- The fourth, I'm not going to pretend otherwise: If the answer about your company is wrong, does the tool tell you? Nobody in this industry, Notified included, can answer this question well yet. That's a real gap, and it's on providers like us to start closing it by building toward a solution in the open where PR teams can see the progress.
That's the bar I'd apply to anyone selling a measurement tool. It's why we partnered with Profound, the leading GenAI marketing intelligence platform, to offer an industry-first capability to our clients.
What Should PR Do Next on AI Visibility?
Within a company, maybe even yours, AI visibility measurement will end up owned by whomever builds the first dashboard and calls it "done." Public relations teams can claim this category and earn this ownership, but only if it's done with the same rigor PR has spent years demanding for everything else.
A few places I'd start:
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Adopt the standard that already exists. Real frameworks are now available, like AMEC's GEO Principles and the IAB's AI-era guidelines and building on that work makes more sense than starting from scratch.
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Ask every provider these four questions, including your own, and hold them to the same standard you'd expect from any other measurement partner.
- Turn this into an industry conversation, not just my opinion. One person writing about this doesn't move anything. If PR bodies, agencies and in-house teams start asking these same four questions industry-wide, the standard stops being one CEO's opinion and starts becoming reality.
Every day this category sits unclaimed, some AI chatbot is making up its mind about your company using whatever's still sitting in the record, updated or not. That should bother you more than a survey ranking ever could.
PR never got a vote on whether AI would start answering for its brands, that decision's already been made, but there's a decision still on the table about who's accountable for whether those answers are true. That should be whoever's been accountable for the record in the first place.
About Notified
Notified, Equiniti’s market engagement business, helps public relations and investor relations professionals earn attention, measure engagement and deliver results through its integrated platforms Content OS™ and IR Hub™. Click here to learn why more than 50% of the S&P 500 trust Notified’s solutions and services to drive demand and attract capital.
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