June’s digital PR trends: How AI influences decision making, self-serving listicles fall further and more trouble for Google?

Brands recommended by AI are 2.5x more likely to be visited in the next 7 days

Similarweb research revealed what happens after your brand has been recommended in AI search. And it’s fascinating.

The study found that brands visible in ChatGPT recommendations were 2.5x more likely to be visited afterwards, with 55.9% of these visits coming from branded searches.

Meaning? AI responses directly influence people to seek out brands at a later date. But attributing this influence is basically impossible.

What does this mean for digital PR?

First up, I’d really recommend checking out the report yourself. It’s well worth a read.

But in terms of how it impacts digital PR, my main takeaways are:

• AI search is now a critical commercial channel. If brands aren’t recommended, their marketing and sales take a hit. I think we’ll see more and more businesses making serious investments into digital PR.
• But it’s delayed-demand. It takes time for the influence that takes place in an AI search response to be reflected onsite. More like traditional brand building, less like performance marketing.
• That makes attribution close to impossible. So many journeys are now zero-click, with much of this impact simply not showing up in analytics at all.
• So, we need to ensure we’re taking credit for the full impact of our PR efforts. Whether it’s upstream or downstream, digital PR has a huge impact on customer journeys. Which means not only measuring AI brand visibility, but also key signals like branded search, website engagement and so on.

Google recommends competitors, not you, in 69% of self-promotional listicles

Last month, I covered the (brilliant) news that Google is demoting the self-serving listicles that have flooded AI search. And now we’ve got a study to back it up.

You’ll definitely have seen these. Brands writing “best of” listicles and putting themselves at the top. Sometimes on a huge scale.

And until now, they’ve worked. AI platforms rely on listicles as key trust signals. But Google’s finally caught on to the brands spamming their way to AI visibility.

Lily Ray’s recent study focused on “best [category] software” searches in Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. She found that while self-promotional listicles were heavily cited, the brand that wrote the self-serving roundup wasn’t recommended 69% of the time.

In other words, these brands are now actively promoting their competitors. If that’s not a reason not to do it, I don’t know what is.

What does this mean for digital PR?

Personally, I think this is great. Fewer self-promotional listicles means higher demand for (real) earned media. Which is fantastic for everyone working in digital PR, and for the wider search landscape.

If coverage in a product or service roundup is earned, you deserve to be there. The journalist/creator/company acts as a gatekeeper, ensuring those featured have genuinely earned that recommendation. Instead of you just shouting "I’M INCREDIBLE" on your own website.

Yes, some of these placements are paid. But at least that provides some sort of a barrier to entry. And discourages some of the spammy sites that are dangerously shortcutting their way into AI recommendations.

So, we should see more opportunities start to open up for expert digital PRs, and a general increase in the quality of the AI search results.

Hopefully.

Landmark ruling declares Google liable for incorrect AI Overviews

This is a bit of news that hasn’t had the widespread coverage I think it deserves.

A German court found Google directly liable for false claims appearing in AI Overviews, which could have massive ramifications for, well, everyone.

Two publishers brought the case against Google because AI Overviews had falsely tied them to scams and dodgy business practices. And the judge basically ruled that AI Overviews aren’t traditional search results. They’re Google’s own content, so it’s liable for what they say.

What does this mean for digital PR?

If – and it’s a big if – this ruling sticks, it could transform AI search for all of us.

Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and the rest could find themselves battling legal disputes all over the place. For the AI tech giants, AI hallucinations would go from a minor annoyance to a business critical issue. Especially as a recent study found that tens of millions of Google answers might be incorrect every hour.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As you’d expect, Google is planning to appeal. It probably won’t get resolved anytime soon. But when it does, it’s very likely that Google will get its way.

So right now, we just need to wait and see.

What else is new in digital PR and SEO?

• UK publishers to bill AI platforms for scraping their content – and they’re planning to take them to court if they don’t. Backed by the Movement for an Open Web (MOW), over 30 UK publishers are making a stand against unwanted AI scraping. Will it work? I hope so.

• ChatGPT only cites 5% of the pages it shows you. Dan Petrovic found that ChatGPT barely uses any of the citations it shares. Whereas Gemini uses pretty much all of them. Meaning? Citations shouldn’t be the focus of your AI search strategy. Recommendations should.

• Bing launches AI reporting update. It just launched a chunky update to Bing Webmaster Tools, with additions like citation share, search intent and topics on their way. And while it’s significantly more valuable than Google’s recent AI search reports, it’s still missing the one thing we want… click data.

• The CMA says Google must make rankings fairer and more open. More good news for the search industry. We might be getting more ranking/visibility transparency, more notice of upcoming updates and a clearer way to flag issues directly to Google.