How AI Engines Decide What to Cite About a Brand: 5 Signals
How AI engines decide which brands to cite: five signals, what the data shows about earned media and sources, and a checklist to test your own brand.
AI Communications Doctrine
44 Articles
Doctrine and opinion: Ronn's essays, frameworks and positions on AI communications and generative engine optimization. No original data; studies go to AI Visibility Research.
GEO Agency: What to Look For and How 5W Approaches It
A GEO agency gets brands cited by AI answer engines. Learn what generative engine optimization includes, six questions to ask before hiring, and how 5W works.
McKinsey Consumer Report: Brand Sites Get 1% of Citations
McKinsey's State of the Consumer 2026 report says brand websites supply only 1 percent of LLM citations in consumer goods. See what it says, where it stops, and a five-step PR plan.
Why AI Slop Detection Is an AI Communications Problem
Ronn Torossian on why Google's SAFE system for AI slop detection makes AI Communications, not just SEO, the defining platform risk heading into 2027.
Citation Share: The Metric That Replaced Market Share
Citation Share is the percentage of AI engine answers to category buyer prompts that name your brand. The definition, the math, the CPG Index findings and how to improve it.
What Does an AI Communications Firm Do
An AI Communications firm builds your brand's authority inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Here's what the discipline actually is — and how it works.
GEO for PR: A Practical Checklist for PR Teams in 2026
A seven-step GEO checklist for PR teams: answer-first leads, crawler settings, source discipline, content-type formats, a review gate and quarterly audits.
How to Rank in ChatGPT Search: A PR Team Checklist
ChatGPT Search does not rank pages like Google does. See how it picks and cites sources, plus a seven-step checklist PR teams can use to earn citations.
25 Years Pitching Reporters: The Gatekeeper Is Gone
The reporter was the gatekeeper for a century. Now a model answers first — before the reporter, the search engine, or the salesperson gets a turn. A new Everything-PR study shows the retrieval layer deciding who exists,
AI Brand Monitoring and Sentiment: Tools and Method
AI brand monitoring and sentiment analysis in one method: the tools, a four-point evaluation framework, a weekly sampling routine, and the traps that skew the data.
The EV Buyer Starts in a Chatbox — and Tesla Already Owns It
Every EV buyer starts inside a chatbox now. Tesla owns nearly one in five AI answers about EVs — more than Rivian, Ford, and Lucid combined. That’s not a lead. That’s a citation moat.
Google Broke 22 Years of Cash Flow to Own the Answer
Alphabet has been public since 2004 and never posted a negative free cash flow quarter. On July 22, 2026, it did: negative $5.9 billion, alongside record operating income. Not a spending problem. A disclosure about where