I have spent more than twenty years getting clients into the room before the room knew it wanted them. Reporters, editors, producers — you learn where the first impression gets made, and you go stand there early. So here is what keeps my attention now: for a company about to go public, the room moved. It is a chatbox.

We built something to measure it. Our team at 5W AI Communications modeled 25 of the most-watched companies entering the U.S. public markets and asked a simple question — when a buyer types the company name into an AI engine, what comes back? We turned it into the IPO AI Visibility Index. I am proud of it. I am also a little alarmed by what it found.

Based on modeled analysis of category prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

Here is the thing nobody preparing for an IPO is looking at. You can spend two years on the audit, the governance, the S-1. You can build the book and ring the bell. And the first thing a meaningful share of analysts, reporters, and recruits will do — before any of that reaches them — is ask an AI engine who you are. More than half of B2B buyers now start there more often than with Google. That is not a prediction. That is this year.

What the index showed me is that being recognized by the engines and being in control of what they say are two completely different things. The companies that own their answer — the infrastructure names, the ones the engines explain confidently and in the company's own words — did not get there with a clever campaign. They got there because they published more about themselves than the market did. They out-wrote everyone. The machine simply repeats whoever wrote the most authoritative thing.

Then there is the middle of the table, which is where I would be nervous if I ran communications for a newly public company. Household names, recognized instantly, explained largely through the decline story the press wrote after the listing. Accurate enough. And completely uncontrolled. That is the most expensive position there is: famous inside the engines, and defenseless about what they say.

I have always believed the same thing about this business, and the AI era has not changed it — it has sharpened it. You build the infrastructure before the crisis, not during it. The quiet period limits what a company can say. It does not limit what the engines repeat. If the chatbox is confidently wrong about your revenue model during the roadshow, that error is sitting in front of exactly the audience you are least able to correct.

People ask whether I should be writing about my own firm's research on my own site. Of course I should. I am a founder and a publisher, and the work my people did here is good — it names a real problem before most of the market has a word for it. That is what I have always done: see where the attention is going to land, and get there first. AI Communications is a mix of journalism, psychology, and engineering. The audience is now the machine. The companies that understand that will own their answer. The rest will inherit one.

Start your product research with AI, not Google. Your buyers already have.

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Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.