Mixologists are no longer solely the product of bartending school.
Corporate communications departments are adding this skillset – not to get the team sloshed, but to continually conjure up the right elixirs to protect and elevate a company’s prominence and reputation in AI search.
While bartenders are heading into summer 2026 with awareness that patrons on GLP-1 therapies are making healthier drink choices, the data analysts inside comms teams are closely watching the battle between Tier One news outlets and the tech giants that dominate AI large-language models (LLMs).
A coalition of 20 major news organizations – from Advance to Ziff Davis – have called on the online content repository Common Crawl to stop harvesting articles from their sites and to delete those already in the archive. A recent demand letter from the News/Media Alliance seeks to have publishers receive compensation for content used to train AI search bots.
“Common Crawl is blatantly taking our content without our permission and failing to honor our opt outs to remove content already taken. We encourage them to act like the good actor they claim to be, honor these requests, and make clear to their users that the content they scrape is not authorized for commercial use unless expressly permitted,” said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance.
For PR teams that have relied for decades on a mix of paid, owned and earned media to influence the way brands are seen in search, the stakes are high.
AI LLMs value content that has been published recently, according to 2026 research from Muck Rack, which found half of AI citations related to content no older than 11 months.
With top news outlets demanding that archival content no longer be cited by AI bots, companies should consider accelerating the cadence of their storytelling, and prioritizing the use of credible channels that are included in the Common Crawl repository.
3BL fits the bill. As the parent network that owns both CSRwire and TriplePundit, 3BL Media’s primary domain is regularly indexed by Common Crawl’s bots. Its articles and editorial content are heavily indexed across multiple historical and current Common Crawl dumps. (Disclosure: I have been on 3BL’s board since 2015 and served as CMO and CEO before stepping into my current vice chair role.)
Beyond building a robust content calendar and using trusted third-party channels beyond a company’s own web site and social feeds, varying the formats used in storytelling can boost results.
Press releases are authoritative but they require approvals from across the enterprise, often including general counsel and investor relations. Articles, reports, white papers, product and customer case studies, employee profiles, podcasts, videos and other less formal content often engender better engagement while showing a company’s values and progress in communities and the marketplace.
AI results are now replacing traditional search on most of our mobile devices. Apple’s new iOS 27 embeds Siri AI into millions of iPhones, while Google Pixel users are defaulted to Gemini when searching for anything – including research into companies that may no longer enjoy a strong presence in the LLMs.
Which brings us back to mixologists. Bottoms up.
