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.

While some communications professionals view AI as a threat, others are quickly figuring out ways to use these phenomenal new tools to turbocharge longstanding strategies and tactics that drive results. It’s in that spirit that we are sharing a couple of use cases from 3BL clients.

• Prompt Discovery Index – One of our clients has written more than 100 prompts for top AI search engines, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and CoPilot.  By running a monthly report, the client can see how effective her content distribution program has been in influencing generative AI to incorporate her brand’s narrative into the answers generated by AI engines. This client has an “intentional repetition” formula of using 3BL to tell stories through press releases, videos, articles, case study reports, and other formats. The goal is to show up ahead of competitors in the large language models (LLMs) used by the AI chatbots. Her “prompt discovery index” is growing every month and is now more important than the SEO reports her organization used for many years to improve visibility in search and social. 

• AI Notices – One clever PR pro, Gab Ferree, recently rebranded a press release as “AI Notices.” They are being used as a generative AI release strategy, but with a deliberate inclusion of more facts and content than is normally found in traditional media or consumer-focused communications. A recent Muck Rack survey found that AI search engines viewed content distributed by services like 3BL as “earned media.” Because many Tier One news outlets are suing AI search engines to block inclusion of their licensed content in results, there is an opportunity to achieve strong AI search performance through AI notices (aka 3BL flexible media releases) and earned media placements on lesser-known “Tier Zero” blogs and news sites. 

This radical transformation in how consumers, investors, policymakers, employees and other key audiences access information is an opportunity to use 3BL’s powerful distribution network – and the fact that our clients’ content is included by LLMs – to improve trust and commercial results. [MORE: AI is Building a New Trust Economy: Will PR Be Part of It?] We would welcome the opportunity to speak with you about your challenges and map ways 3BL can become a partner as you retool to meet the moment. Image Source: Google Gemini AI 

You can’t spell Climate Week without AI. Otherwise, it would be Clmte Week.

All kidding aside, artificial intelligence figured into just about every panel, conference, keynote and forum in New York last week. During the workshop, “How AI is Disrupting Sustainability Reporting,”  I focused on the pitfalls of green hushing. Companies that have stopped talking about their sustainability and impact work stand out like a sore thumb when a record 99 percent of S&P 500 companies are now issuing sustainability reports.

Even mid-cap companies – those in the bottom half of the Russell 1000 Index – issued 2024 sustainability reports in record numbers, 89.7 percent, according to a September 2025 analysis by the Governance and Accountability Institute.

The bots that spider corporate web sites and reporting frameworks quickly locate and ingest reports and filings as soon as they go live. This process ensures that ESG ratings and rankings agencies, investors and other stakeholders have access to a company’s data from the most recent reporting period.   Beyond that annual data dump, what many companies are providing in terms of updates, stories and context is, in actuality, the sound of silence. An analysis of online mentions of hundreds of common terms used in sustainability and impact narratives dropped from 438,000 in 2024 to 396,000 in 2025. The declines in earned media across broadcast, print and online was also seen in corporate-issued updates, according to 3BL’s analysis. 

This green hushing is happening at the same time AI search is changing the way information is found online.  Brands that thought they figured out how to position themselves for Google search are at reputational risk now that AI is eliminating billions of clicks. Imagine reaching a difficult goal, perhaps the best in your industry, and not having it referenced during an AI search.   Without a steady flow of corporate information to the Large Language Models (LLMs) feeding generative search engines, companies risk posts from Reddit and LinkedIn being cited rather than a brand’s news, articles, videos and reports. When there is doubt about whether a company remains committed to sustainability, there is an erosion of trust, according to a survey conducted by 3BL, TriplePundit and Glow, “Say less, risk more: Sustainability silence is undermining trust.”

Silence is no longer neutral. It triggers skepticism with consumers.  If there is one thing I have learned in 15 years working with 3BL’s client base of 1,500 brands, visibility amplifies trust for companies that continue to communicate about their sustainability and impact work.

One of my longtime former co-workers died last month. I very much respected her work and looked in vain for an obituary. Sadly, her life story remains untold beyond occasional posts to her Facebook page. The irony is that she had worked for decades at public relations giants like Carl Byoir and PR Newswire, creating brand stories that withstood the test of time. 

Whether an individual or a company, I am an advocate of telling your own story. Without your framing and perspective, there’s a risk someone will tell your story for you. 

It might be positive, but there’s a pretty good chance of important facts or color being omitted. For individuals, the nonprofit StoryCorps has made the process easy. Audio interviews may be contributed at no charge by anyone, and they become part of the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. I smiled today listening to an interview with my favorite high school teacher, J. Ernest DuBois. 

For companies, the art of storytelling is evolving quickly due to changes in the way people and machines gather information. Just a few years back, a corporate website optimized for search engines did the trick. On top of that, brands routinely posted to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn – and they pitched stories to business reporters at dailies and trade pubs. Today, those typing a query into a browser search bar are likely to see results from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots that may or may not be indexing a corporate website. The large language models (LLMs) feeding Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT are becoming the new Google Search. Social platforms have been politicized, and angry comments from trolls often poison even the most innocuous posts from a CEO or company. 

The collapse of the paid media model that supported most news sites has hastened an already alarming trend of belt-tightening by debt-heavy media companies. The few remaining reporters inside once-bustling newsrooms are now chasing scandals and breaking news stories rather than features, profiles, and enterprise reporting. But demand for information about companies and what they stand for is growing exponentially.  And the stakes are enormous. Research conducted last year by 3BL, TriplePundit, Glow, and Cint found that consumers switching brands for sustainability reasons represent a $44 billion opportunity across 12 U.S. industries. This means that a significant amount of revenue is shifting towards companies that are perceived as more sustainable. Companies stand to gain a competitive and reputational advantage by actively sharing stories about reducing emissions and waste, using less water, and caring for their employees and communities. Those brands that move beyond a static, annual sustainability report and embrace an approach of always-on storytelling can measure the return on investment through employee recruitment and retention, inclusion in respected ratings and rankings, and in sales. Brand journalism, when combined with audience insights and an engagement strategy built for AI LLMs, is fast becoming a best practice for companies with good stories to tell.