By Stuart Lambert, co-founder
Yesterday’s Google I/O wasn’t really the usual tech ‘product launch’ event. It was Google signalling, very clearly, that the era of the search engine – which it dominated – is ending and the era of the answer engine is already here.
For comms teams, several of the announcements have immediate implications. Most importantly, they force a rethink of what visibility and authority actually mean online. Three things:
1. Citation is the new ranking
For years, SEO has been the proxy measure for owned media performance. Where do we rank? How many backlinks do we have? What’s our domain authority?
Those metrics still matter. They’re just no longer the thing that matters most.
Google AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of all search queries, up 58% since December 2025. For informational and research-led searches, the figure is even higher. In B2B technology, AI Overviews now appear on more than 80% of searches. AI and LLMs are now a stakeholder audience and reputation is shaped in their answers to user questions.
Searches about a company’s environmental record, or its response to controversy, or its position on an industry issue. These are the moments where comms should be shaping authority. And increasingly, traditional rankings matter less than whether your organisation gets cited by the AI layer sitting above them.
The commercial logic is already becoming obvious. Brands cited inside AI Overviews receive significantly more organic clicks and materially stronger paid performance than brands that aren’t cited on the same page.
Citation is the new ‘page one’. And ranking first in traditional search results no longer guarantees visibility in AI responses anyway.
The implication for comms is simple, even if the execution isn’t. Your owned media needs to become the source generative systems want to reference.
That means substance. Specificity. Original thinking. Not content for content’s sake. Good IP, good research. And good thought leadership.
2. Original IP/research/data is VITAL
Generative engines reward originality. They cite the source, not the summary of the source. They do not need another recycled opinion piece repeating consensus thinking. They need the place where a number, insight or claim originated.
This changes the value of thought leadership quite dramatically.
A decent opinion article with no original evidence may still be read by humans; AI systems, however, can easily synthesise that into an answer without brand attribution.
But proprietary data, original research, or findings that exist nowhere else? AI systems have no choice but to reference the source.
That’s why the organisations gaining AI Overview citations fastest are investing heavily in original journalism, exclusive datasets and research-led content strategies.
The same logic now applies directly to corporate communications.
Annual research programmes, sector surveys and data partnerships are no longer “nice to have” thought leadership exercises. They are increasingly how organisations maintain visibility in an AI-mediated internet.
3. Gemini Spark means your stakeholders now have a 24/7 monitoring agent
One of the most important announcements at I/O has barely made a splash outside the tech press (so far).
Gemini Spark is an AI agent that monitors information continuously on your behalf. It tracks topics, surfaces updates, synthesises context and identifies sentiment, even while your devices are closed.
Which means senior executives, investors and journalists are about to gain always-on media monitoring capabilities at near-zero cost.
For comms teams, that changes expectations quickly.
The traditional PR agency morning monitoring report might be superseded, in terms of speed, by a client’s AI agent identifying an emerging issue in real time.
And it’s not just about speed. The quality of monitoring is changing too. Spark doesn’t simply identify mentions. It contextualises them.
That has historically been positioned as premium strategic value from agencies and communications teams. It is rapidly becoming table stakes.
Which means the value shifts to the things AI still can’t replicate: judgement, relationships, strategic clarity, the confidence to move quickly with a clear point of view, creativity in the response.
4. Provenance is becoming a communications issue
The most important long-term shift may end up being provenance.
Google’s expansion of SynthID and C2PA Content Credentials across Search, Chrome, Gemini and Pixel devices points towards a future where authenticity itself becomes machine-readable.
Google’s own research suggests people correctly identify high-quality deepfakes only around a quarter of the time. At the same time, SynthID has already watermarked more than 100 billion images and videos.
In practical terms, the internet is moving towards a world where “is this real?” becomes far easier to answer at scale.
AI-generated content will increasingly carry identifiable signals. Authentic camera-captured content will increasingly carry verifiable credentials.
That has major implications for communications teams.
It means AI-generated campaign assets, social content and media materials may soon be instantly identifiable. It means authentic content gains a credibility advantage. And it means manipulated media crises may become faster to resolve, or faster to escalate.
The organisations that navigate this well will establish clear internal positions early: what is AI-assisted, what is original, how it is labelled, and who decides.
This isn’t just a technical governance issue. It’s a reputation issue.
What three things should comms teams do right now?
Audit your owned media for citation value.
If your content is built entirely on publicly available information, AI systems will treat it as background context rather than a source worth citing.
Invest in thought leadership and research that actually cuts through.
If your business doesn’t own a meaningful piece of original data, the case for creating one just became much stronger. But way too much corporate thought leadership never rises above the surface. Apply some ‘brand’ creativity to it; your corporate stakeholders are humans too.
Establish a provenance policy.
Before industry norms settle around AI-generated content labelling, decide your own position and governance approach internally.
The message from Google was unmistakable: they won’t be content to let AI just sit on top of their core product (search). Instead, they see AI as the very infrastructure beneath it. For us in comms it’s vital we understand this isn’t a technical shift but a visibility, trust and authority one. Which makes it a reputation shift too.