How Expert-Led Digital PR Helps Brands Earn AI Overviews and AI Search Visibility

Mike Hakob, Founder and CEO of Andava.com and Formstory.io, explains how expert-led digital PR can help brands improve their AI search visibility and boost their visibility in AI overviews. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.

AI Overviews and chatbots now answer questions before users ever see a search result. For most brands, that’s a visibility problem they’re not prepared for. AI systems don’t rely on rankings or brand claims; they rely on trusted third-party validation. If your experts aren’t consistently cited in authoritative media, you’re invisible in AI answers.

In this article, we’ll explain how expert-led digital PR works as a discovery signal, how AI interprets those signals, and why this approach has become essential for modern search visibility.

Campaign Results Snapshot

By consistently positioning a real industry expert in authoritative media, a recent real estate campaign achieved significant increases in AI citations across all major AI systems. The campaign secured over 300 high-authority mentions from sites such as Realtor, Fortune, Nasdaq, Yahoo, MSN, and Homes.com.

• AI Overviews: Citations increased by over 130 percent.
• ChatGPT: Brand citations grew by nearly 400 percent, and pages cited by AI increased by over 120 percent.
• Perplexity: AI citations increased by around 200 percent, and cited pages grew by almost 100 percent.
• Gemini: AI citations increased by more than 350 percent, and cited pages increased by over 700 percent.
• Copilot: AI citations increased by more than 300 percent, and cited pages grew by over 250 percent.

Why Expert Quotes Matter in the AI Search Era

AI systems evaluate information in much the same way humans research topics. It’s not magic. Mentions from trusted publications help AI models assess credibility, just like a person would check multiple sources before making a decision. AI Overviews rely heavily on external validation, not self-claims.

AI Systems Mirror Human Research Behavior

According to Google Search, AI Overviews now reach 1.5 billion monthly users across 200 countries. That’s a massive scale. It makes this the largest generative AI deployment globally, and the system’s behavior mirrors human research patterns in fascinating ways.

Google’s VP of Product explained: “The AI thinks a lot like a person would in terms of the kinds of questions it issues. So if you’re a business and you’re mentioned in top business lists or from a public article that lots of people end up finding, those kinds of things become useful for the AI to find.”

AI platforms generated 1.13 billion referral visits in June 2025. That represents a 357 percent increase from June 2024. Explosive growth. This shows exactly why expert positioning matters now; the landscape has fundamentally changed in less than a year.

How PR Functions as a Discovery Signal

PR is not a ranking factor. Let’s be clear about that. But it is a discovery and trust signal, which matters just as much in the AI era. The process works like this:

• Journalists quote experts in trusted publications.
• AI systems surface those articles during query processing.
• Repeated expert mentions reinforce authority.
• AI Overviews pull insights from multiple corroborating sources.

Expert quotes are inputs for AI understanding. Think of them as training data. Media coverage shapes AI answers even if users never read the articles. AI reads, indexes, and uses them to form responses.

Defining the Expert Before You Pitch

AI prefers clear, narrow expertise. Generic spokespeople fail every time. Why? Because journalists filter expert responses based on specificity, and AI systems pick up on those same quality signals. For example, assign each expert to a specific topic lane and limit them to a small number of repeatable themes. Stick to this focus to maximize AI signal strength.

Creating Focused Expert Positioning

Prepare experts to answer complex, real-world questions. Not marketing points. Not brand messaging. Real questions that real people ask. AI systems reuse expert insights when expertise is consistent, specific, and verifiable across multiple sources.

For example:

• A real estate expert should focus on mortgage trends, not general business advice.
• A finance expert should cover investment strategy, not unrelated economic topics.
• A healthcare expert should specialize in one treatment area, not all medical fields.

The narrower the lane, the stronger the signal. Consistency across mentions matters more than breadth.

Creating AI-Friendly Expert Commentary

Quotes should survive editorial filtering and AI reuse. That’s the test. Clear explanations work better than opinions. Context that answers why and how. Neutral, educational tone that journalists trust. Standalone clarity that makes sense on its own, even when pulled out of context.

What to Include in Expert Quotes

Journalists prioritize accuracy and credibility when evaluating expert commentary. In a global survey of more than 3,100 journalists, ensuring content accuracy emerged as the top priority, with many also citing the challenge of maintaining trust and separating fact from opinion. As a result, expert quotes must go beyond opinions and be firmly grounded in verifiable information.

Strong expert commentary includes:

• Clear, fact-based explanations that show cause and effect
• Credible data, research, or documented evidence to support claims
• Real-world examples that reinforce accuracy and reliability
• Context that helps audiences distinguish facts from opinions
• Actionable insights that contribute to informed, trustworthy reporting

What to Avoid

Avoid buzzwords. Avoid overly short reactions. Avoid sales language. Avoid brand-led framing. These are dealbreakers for journalists.

Journalists are cautious with AI. They’re actively filtering it out. They mainly use Pangram and GPTzero to detect and remove AI-generated responses, so the text should not be flagged as AI-generated. Write like a human expert, not a language model. This approach aligns with Google’s emphasis on helpful, clear content across traditional search, AI Overviews, and conversational AI answers. Expert quotes should be written like journalists: precise, factual, and easy to understand.

To do this well, experts should study a journalist’s previous articles, note the types of quotes they use, and mirror the structure, tone, and depth that have proven helpful to their audience.

Finding the Right Journalists and Requests

Expert PR starts with finding the right journalists and queries. Not every opportunity is worth pursuing. Quality beats quantity every time. Consider using platforms for finding journalist requests, including ResponseSource, HARO/Connectively, Qwoted, Featured, JournoFinder, and X (Twitter) advanced search. After all, according to Muck Rack’s survey, 73 percent of journalists decline PR pitches because the content doesn’t align with their coverage focus. Relevance is everything.

Evaluating Request Fit

Journalists respond to only 3.27 percent of all the pitches they receive. They can receive more than 100 pitches per week, most of which are considered irrelevant or unhelpful. Before responding to any request, ask these questions:

• Is the journalist writing for a publication that AI systems already trust?
• Is the topic aligned with the expert’s defined lane?
• Is the request informational, not promotional?
• Is the publication likely to be syndicated or referenced elsewhere?

Not every journalist’s request is valuable. The goal is relevance and authority, not volume.

Journalists also use AI detection tools to filter responses, so be sure to avoid formulaic structures, vary sentence length, and include specific details only a real expert would know.

Reactive PR vs Proactive PR (And Why You Need Both)

AI visibility compounds over time. You need both approaches working together. Reactive PR gets you in the conversation today, while proactive PR keeps you there tomorrow. Specifically, Reactive PR means responding quickly to journalists’ requests. The workflow is simple:

• Monitor journalist request platforms daily.
• Evaluate fit against your expert’s lane.
• Respond within hours, not days.
• Provide concise, expert answers.
• Prioritize speed and relevance over perfection.

Reactive PR fuels immediate mentions. When journalists need an expert on deadlines, being fast and helpful wins the day.

Proactive PR: Building Long-Term Authority

Proactive PR means publishing expert commentary around predictable topics. The approach includes:

• Contributing to industry explainers and list articles
• Supporting long-form editorial features
• Pitching expert insights on upcoming trends
• Offering data and research to journalists before they ask

Proactive PR builds long-term authority signals that AI continues to reference. An expert column published six months ago still feeds AI responses today.

Around 93 percent of PR professionals include expert commentary as a core part of their digital PR toolkit. And the combination of both approaches creates sustained visibility. Reactive work gets you mentioned this week, while proactive work gets you cited for months.

How AI Overviews Are Earned

The mechanism is not a hack. It is a process. Understanding the workflow helps teams execute more strategically.

The Five-Step Process

• Step one: Journalists quote experts in trusted publications. They need authoritative voices to support their stories.
• Step two: Articles are indexed and referenced across the web. Search engines crawl and catalog the content.
• Step three: AI systems surface those articles during query fan-out. When someone asks a question, AI issues multiple searches to gather information.
• Step four: Repeated expert mentions reinforce authority. AI sees the same expert cited across multiple sources. This builds a pattern of credibility.
• Step five: AI Overviews pull insights from multiple corroborating sources. AI synthesizes information from several articles. Your expert’s perspective becomes part of the answer.

Growing AI Overview Presence

Research indicates a sharp rise in AI Overviews across multiple industries. For B2B tech-related searches, their presence grew from 36 percent to 70 percent of results. In insurance, coverage expanded from 17 percent to 63 percent, while entertainment searches rose from 2 percent to 37 percent.

The pattern is clear. AI systems are looking for expert validation from multiple authoritative sources. One mention is not enough—consistency across publications matters.

Pro tip: Our experts adapt their responses to match how journalists write and how they phrase their expert requests. This approach has led to a much higher success rate. Another effective tactic is to review the journalist’s previous articles to see which expert quotes they have accepted before and how those quotes are structured.

Measuring Impact Without Vanity Metrics

Focus on what counts. Conventional PR metrics fail to track AI visibility, so teams need fresh frameworks tailored to how AI actually surfaces and uses content. Focus on percentage-based increases in:

• AI citations across all platforms
• AI Overview appearances for target queries
• AI-surfaced pages from your domain
• Relative domain authority growth (percentage only)
• Visibility across multiple AI platforms, not just Google

AI Search traffic converts at 14.2 percent compared to Google’s 2.8 percent, showing this traffic is dramatically more valuable. ChatGPT accounted for 50 percent of AI traffic in recent studies.

Avoiding Single-Platform Obsession

Look for patterns across AI systems. Measure visibility, not clicks alone. Only 22 percent of marketers are actively tracking AI visibility and traffic. This is a competitive advantage for those who do. Consider monitoring things like:

• Number of unique AI platforms citing your brand
• Types of queries that trigger your expert mentions
• How often does your expert appear compared to competitors
• Quality of publications where experts are quoted

The metrics should tie directly to business outcomes. AI citations in high-intent queries before customer contact are especially valuable. Track patterns over months as AI visibility grows gradually. Consistent expert positioning over six months produces measurable impact.

What This Means for Modern PR Teams

Expert quoting is now a core discovery channel. AI visibility is shaped by editorial trust. Digital PR must be structured, not opportunistic. Consistency beats scale. While the old PR playbook was about getting coverage and hoping for links, the new digital PR playbook is about earning AI citations through systematic expert positioning. Teams that understand how AI systems discover and reference information will control their category narrative.

Zero-click searches jumped from 56 percent to 69 percent between May 2024 and May 2025. More than two-thirds of searches now end without a click. When someone asks a chatbot a question, they get answers without visiting a website. Show up in those responses, and you are instantly positioned as the authority. Expert-led digital PR is no longer optional for brands that want to be found.