In recent months, the communications profession has been gripped by AI visibility fever. How should we build our corporate website so that it becomes a proper source of information for AI-based search engines? What topics should we communicate about, and on which platforms, so that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the other AI engines are likely to find us and cite us in their answers to various questions? And what is our competition doing better or worse? These are among the questions covered by so-called AI visibility, and they’ve been keeping PR professionals up at night in recent months.
AI visibility on scientific foundations
Every year, the Worldcom PR Group produces the Worldcom Healthcare Monitor report on the digital communications of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. This year the study came out for the fifth time, but in a significantly reworked form. The focus is no longer on ranking companies against each other; instead, AI visibility has moved to the center. The research essentially covered 10 pharmaceutical companies; more on them later. The key point, though, is that the pharma market functions as a kind of barometer for the communications profession. It’s a fairly innovative, globally visible, commercially strong and socially highly important sector that also has a substantial marketing and communications budget. So what’s happening here is likely to happen in other industries too (including some heavily regulated ones) within a fairly short timeframe. Of course, some industries are further along and others further behind, but overall (and this is also the conclusion of the study’s authors) I believe this year’s Worldcom Healthcare Monitor offers lessons that can be useful for almost every communications professional.
5 AI visibility takeaways
The study contains many points worth considering. In this first pass, I’d highlight the following, since these are relevant not only to pharmaceutical companies but to every business.
- Continuous trust-building matters more than standalone campaigns. Earning reputation and trust no longer depends on one-off marketing campaigns, but on transparent, credible and continuous information flow.
- Precise segmentation by target audience is a must. No single platform or piece of content can speak to everyone at once; corporate messages and calls to action (CTAs) need to be strictly tailored to the needs of a specific target group (e.g. retail customers versus business partners).
- Le tus be prepared for AI-based search! Alongside classic SEO (search engine optimization), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has gained new importance. Content needs to be built so that AI-based providers (e.g. ChatGPT, Perplexity) use it as a relevant, citable source in their generated answers.
- Technical foundations and structure has a direct impact on reputation. A poorly structured website, an opaque information architecture, or technical errors make life harder for AI search engines, can cause mistakes or gaps in the answers they generate, and thereby directly undermine trust in the organization – even where the underlying strategic messaging is excellent.
- Combining professional precision (in some industries, even scientific accuracy) with accessibility is important. Whatever the industry, even the most advanced and complex products and data must be translatable into a human, practical and easily understandable narrative in order to reach consumers.
Research methodology
Worldcom’s research focused on the following global pharmaceutical companies: AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, and Sanofi.
Instead of the scored rankings used in previous years, this year’s analysis applied a so-called “deep dive” methodology, examining the digital communications of only the 10 companies named above, but in far greater depth than before. On one hand, the research was built on a comprehensive technical audit of the companies’ public websites: with the professional support of the Digital Insights Lab, the experts analyzed the sites’ structure, indexability, internal link architecture, as well as the readability and accessibility of their content.
The other pioneering pillar of the AI visibility research was an examination of presence within AI-based search engines. Using the Brandi AI™ platform, the experts measured the proportion, sentiment, and cited sources with which AI-driven answer systems (such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews) feature each brand in their own generated responses.
Basic questions
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility measures how much, and in what way, a brand or company appears in AI-generated answers; for example, when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation, information, or a comparison within a given industry.
How does GEO differ from traditional SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) aims to get a website to rank as high as possible in traditional search results listings. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), by contrast, is about making content available in a form and quality such that AI engines cite it as a relevant, trustworthy source within their own generated answers. Not in a list of links, but within the text of the answer itself.
Why does this matter now for every company, not just the pharmaceutical industry?
The pharmaceutical industry is a good indicator because it is innovative, heavily regulated, and has a substantial communications budget; what emerges as a trend here tends, based on experience, to soon become significant in other industries as well. AI-based search is already influencing what information consumers and business partners rely on when making decisions about a brand.
How can I assess my own company’s AI visibility?
It’s worth regularly testing what various AI engines answer when asked about our industry, our products, or our competitors, and checking where (and with what sentiment) our own brand appears (or doesn’t appear). A technical audit (website structure, indexability, content readability) is likewise an essential foundation for good AI visibility.
If you’re curious about the full study – including the detailed analysis of the ten companies examined and the results of the Digital Insights Lab’s technical audit – w rite to rnagy@probako.hu and I’ll be happy to send it to you.
