In the era of AI-powered search, traditional SEO tactics aren’t enough. Building a trusted brand through PR and thought leadership is now central to visibility.
For years, SEO and brand marketing ran on parallel tracks. SEO was the technical engine—focused on keywords, backlinks, and metadata. Brand marketing was about big ideas, reputation, and emotional connection. But as Google and other search engines shift toward artificial intelligence and entity-based understanding, the wall between those disciplines is coming down fast.
To succeed in search today, ranking signals are no longer just about content and links—they’re about credibility, context, and authority. In other words: brand. And to build that authority, marketers must embrace what PR and brand strategists have known all along.
This convergence is being called Entity SEO—and it’s not brand marketing reinventing itself. It’s SEO finally catching up to brand marketing.
Search engines used to focus on pages. Now, they focus on entities—people, companies, products, ideas. In fact, Google’s Knowledge Graph, introduced in 2012, was an early signal of this shift. Today, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and other AI-driven tools are taking it further by surfacing summaries, recommendations, and named brands directly in the search result itself.
When someone types a question into Google, they’re not just getting a list of blue links. Increasingly, they get an AI-generated response that mentions companies by name—brands Google’s algorithms recognize and trust. That trust isn’t built with keywords or backlinks alone. It’s built with reputation. With credibility. With context.
It’s built with brand marketing.
What we call Entity SEO is really SEO maturing. It's moving beyond tactics that try to "game" the algorithm and embracing what Google's AI actually values: trusted, consistent, well-known brands.
To be clear, technical SEO still matters. But if your brand isn’t seen as a credible authority in your space—if it doesn’t show up in articles, directories, expert lists, and third-party sites—your beautifully optimized content might still be invisible to AI search results.
In this new environment, PR and thought leadership are no longer nice-to-haves. They’re how your brand gets recognized as an “entity” that matters. SEO professionals need to think like brand marketers and PR strategists—or get left behind.
AI models like Google’s SGE and ChatGPT don’t just crawl HTML. They learn from language. They learn from patterns. And they determine relevance and trust based on how often your brand appears in contextually relevant, high-authority places.
That’s exactly what PR delivers. Here’s how:
Every time your company is mentioned in a news story, analyst report, or industry blog, it reinforces your authority as a topic expert. These unlinked mentions might not boost PageRank, but they absolutely influence AI-generated results. LLMs don’t rely solely on hyperlinks—they learn from association.
AI wants to quote experts. Consistently publishing executive bylines, participating in interviews, and being seen as a voice in your industry builds the kind of topical depth search engines are now prioritizing. That’s not a backlink strategy—it’s a branding one.
To Google, inconsistency is confusion. Having a clear, cohesive story across your website, social channels, press materials, and third-party profiles (like Crunchbase, G2, Wikipedia) strengthens your entity’s “signal.” PR teams are uniquely equipped to manage this narrative consistency across platforms.
What the internet says about your brand matters more than ever. If the only media about your company is negative—or if there’s little context for AI models to work with—you simply won’t show up. PR helps shape your reputation proactively, long before it’s needed reactively.
Let’s be honest: SEO didn’t use to care much about brands. It cared about rankings. And that led to some bad habits—chasing keywords, buying backlinks, and spinning low-value content just to climb the SERP.
That world is gone.
Google’s AI—and AI-powered discovery in general—is brand-first. Not because it’s been reprogrammed to like PR, but because it’s been trained to think like a human. And humans trust familiar names. They trust companies with presence. With story. With credibility.
That’s why the smartest SEO strategies today are deeply integrated with PR. Not as an add-on, but as the foundation. Because if Google doesn’t know your brand—or doesn’t trust it—you’re not getting recommended.
You can’t SEO your way to the top without building brand equity anymore. If you want AI to include your company in its answers, your company needs to be part of the conversation—and that comes from PR, thought leadership, and brand storytelling.
Entity SEO is not brand marketing by another name. It’s SEO finally learning that brand marketing was the point all along.