Every day, millions of users type questions into Google and receive AI-generated summaries at the top of their search results. For PR professionals, this shift in information delivery is seismic.
The AI summary often appears before any link is clicked, meaning a founder’s nuanced byline or a CEO’s carefully crafted op-ed may be reduced to a two-sentence answer, stripped of context and attribution.
The implications are clear: narrative authority is slipping from human hands to machine logic. Brands that once relied on bylines, interviews and expert commentary to shape their reputation now face a new challenge: how to maintain their voice and protect intellectual property in a world where AI decides what gets seen, cited and remembered.
From Author to Algorithm: The Shift in Storytelling Power
In the past, the byline was sacred. If you published an article in Forbes or Fast Company, your name and your company’s brand traveled with your insights. Today, algorithms ingest, summarize and remix content from across the web, often blurring the lines of authorship and source credibility. It is not uncommon for an executive’s quote to appear in a Google AI Overview or a generative search result without a single mention of its origin. This loss of attribution not only erodes individual authority but also dilutes brand equity.
Consider the experience of many leaders who see their thought pieces distilled into anonymous snippets. The question is stark: if your message is paraphrased by AI and delivered without credit, do you still own the impact? The answer is complicated. AI models are trained on vast texts, absorbing the voices of experts but outputting only what fits their summary logic. As Dentons points out in its analysis of AI and intellectual property rights, brands must now design their content with the algorithm in mind, embedding repeatable and recognizable messaging that machines can reliably extract and attribute.
Evolving Thought Leadership for the AI Age
Long-form op-eds, keynote interviews, and whitepapers still matter, but their influence depends on how well they can be parsed by AI. Executives like Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Bumble's Whitney Wolfe Herd have mastered the art of delivering headline-ready soundbites—insights that can be extracted, quoted and shared across digital channels. This is not accidental. The modern executive must now think in modular content units: succinct statements, thematic consistency and semantic clarity.
Lumenci’s research on AI and intellectual property highlights the importance of creating modular, AI-friendly content formats. This means structuring articles so every section can stand on its own, using consistent terminology and avoiding jargon that confuses both human readers and machines. Thematic repetition is no longer redundant; it is a safeguard that helps AI models recognize and properly attribute your core messages. Metadata and structured data, such as schema markup (a form of code webmasters add to their website's HTML to help search engines better understand the content on their pages), play a critical role. When a press release or an executive Q&A is tagged with clear metadata, AI is more likely to connect the content to its rightful source.
The Senior Executive Group’s analysis reinforces this point, advising brands to engineer their communications for both human and machine consumption. Message clarity is now a competitive advantage. If your insights are ambiguous or buried in complex prose, AI is unlikely to surface them in a way that benefits a brand.
Strategic PR as a Narrative Anchor
Public relations is no longer just about securing coverage; it is about training the machine that will retell your story. Every press release, interview and blog post is a potential data point for AI models. The tactics that once drove visibility now serve another purpose: shaping the training data that determines how a brand is represented in AI-generated responses.
A well-placed press release, structured with that schema markup and rich metadata, can be indexed in ways that directly influence how AI summarizes your brand’s narrative. PR campaigns must now align with branded keywords, ensuring that interviews and quotes are tagged consistently across platforms. The terminology used in a press release should match what appears on the website, in your social bios, and across owned media. This consistency increases the likelihood that AI will recognize the messaging as authoritative and attribute it correctly.
Research shows that PR professionals who proactively manage metadata and structured content can guide AI-generated narratives, reinforcing brand authority and reputation. PR teams should regularly audit how their brand is being summarized by AI, and adjust their content and metadata as needed to maintain narrative control.
Multi-Format Thought Leadership: Meeting AI Where It Lives
To be discoverable in an AI-dominated search environment, content must be modular and multi-format. A founder’s insight delivered in a podcast or video clip can now surface in Google Discover, YouTube Shorts, or even in AI-generated search summaries. Brands that rely solely on traditional written content risk being left behind.
Short-form videos, LinkedIn carousels, expert Q&A blog posts, and schema-structured web pages all feed the machine. The goal is not just to publish content, but to create assets that can be sliced, cited and summarized across different formats. For example, a video interview with a CMO can be transcribed, broken into key quotes, and tagged with schema markup, making it more likely to appear in both human and AI-driven search results.
The use of schema markup can help AI identify and attribute original sources. This technical detail is now a core part of marketing and PR, not just an SEO afterthought. Brands like Shopify and Adobe have invested in coordinated PR and content campaigns that span written, audio and video formats, ensuring their executives are quoted, summarized and represented accurately across AI-driven platforms.
The importance of multi-format content is underscored by the way AI models are trained. If your insights only exist in a single format, they may be overlooked or misattributed. By distributing your message across blog posts, podcasts, videos and infographics, all tagged with consistent metadata, you increase the likelihood that AI will surface your content and credit your brand.
Legal Considerations: Protecting Ownership in the Age of AI
The legal landscape around AI-generated content remains unsettled, but marketers and PR professionals cannot afford to ignore it. U.S. copyright law currently does not recognize AI-generated content as eligible for copyright protection, as it requires human authorship. This means that summaries generated by AI, even if derived from your original work, may not be protected in the same way as traditional content.
There are risks associated with AI repurposing existing works, including potential intellectual property infringement. Brands should review their licensing agreements and terms of use to address the use of their content in AI training and output. It is important to implement contractual safeguards and regularly review policies to protect intellectual property in this new environment.
To mitigate legal risk, marketers should clearly distinguish between AI-assisted and fully AI-created works, ensuring that human authorship is documented and attributed where possible. This clarity not only supports legal protection but also reinforces brand authority in the eyes of both human audiences and AI models.
Reclaiming the Story Before It’s Summarized
AI will continue to evolve, and its influence over content discovery and narrative control will only grow. Forward-thinking brands are already adapting. Coordinated PR and content strategies are already emerging to shape how executives are quoted and represented in AI-driven search results.
For communicators, the mandate is clear. Build campaigns not just for human audiences, but for the algorithms that increasingly mediate reputation and authority. Structure every press release, article and interview with metadata and schema markup. Align messaging across formats and channels. Audit how your brand is being summarized by AI, and adjust your content accordingly. The story does not end when it is published; it lives on in every machine-generated summary, snippet and search result.
Matt Caiola is CEO at 5WPR.