For over a decade now, publicists and marketers have echoed the resounding cry, “Content is king!” Many professionals in brand communications have continually preached the gospel of owned content. I’ve advised my PR clients that an owned email list, blog or video channel is the safest, cheapest way to expand brand awareness, establish authority and draw attention to their websites or product pages without resorting to paid media investments.
These days, owned content faces a lot of uncertainty. The rise of AI-powered search engines and the use of social media platforms for search purposes are changing the way people discover brands.
Search Traffic Has Changed
AI-powered search engines like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity already drive less traffic to publishers and blogs because they put an answer to the query on top, leaving little need to click through to a page. However, SearchGPT (also known as OAI-SearchBot), OpenAI’s search/chat combo currently in beta, does offer a list of links alongside the chatbot conversation—just not to individual business or product pages.
Instead, it’s mostly giving links to publishers’ product aggregations, like Runner’s World’s “10 Best Running Shoes” or Yoga Journal’s “8 Best Yoga Mats,” etc. SearchGPT won’t link to an individual shoe brand’s page, for example, but it will link to publications that recommend it. So it’s crucial for brands to pitch and get placed on those publications using the power of PR.
The Ongoing Publisher Issue with AI Search
One caveat here is that not all publishers agree to be crawled or included in SearchGPT’s results; in fact, several media titans have already expressly prohibited it.
According to Originality.AI, “Despite their assurances that OAI-SearchBot is ‘not used to crawl content to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundational models,’ 14 leading publishers [including The New York Times, GQ, Vogue, Wired, and The New Yorker] have decided to block it, essentially excluding themselves from being linked to in the SearchGPT results.”
It’s understandable why publishers wouldn’t want large language models (LLMs) crawling their content for free and spitting out answers it learned there for a profit (Google taught them that lesson in the early 2000s). But it’s unclear why they wouldn’t want to be included in its search results and get the traffic that follows. Business Insider theorizes maybe they just don’t trust OpenAI because they’ve been burned before.
Google Still Reigns Supreme (For Now)
Without access to some of the most trusted information sources, it’s unlikely SearchGPT will ever completely overtake Google. The latter is still dominant for now, but the recent Department of Justice antitrust ruling against Google foreshadows its market share significantly decreasing over the next few years, leaving opportunities for SearchGPT or other AI search engines to fill the space.
“I think Google’s real greatest threat is social search,” says Michael Robbins, Senior Search Manager at Exverus Media. “Gen Z increasingly uses social media platforms to discover new brands and learn about topics they’re interested in, more so than traditional search engines.”
If Robbins is correct, that also underscores the importance of PR for brand discovery, because big publications have big social media followings (and niche publications have smaller but well-targeted followings). It’s much easier to be discovered on social media if you’re shouted out by a trusted account with a built-in audience than it is to build your own from scratch.
We’ll see how the chips fall over the next year or so. Don’t abandon owned content yet—it’s still important for building a brand’s ecosystem and community, but if you’re looking for new PR clients in 2025, they’ll have good reasons to invest in you.
Michelle Andrade is the PR & Communications Manager for Exverus Media.