By Darryl Sparey, co-founder
My Mum has a great many strengths. In fact, she’s probably the strongest person I know. Kind, to a fault. Selfless. Hard working. Dedicated to her family. But of the many lionising epithets I might garland my much beloved Mum with, I would absolutely NOT describe her as having her finger on the pulse of technology or culture.
This is the woman who, lest we forget, asked “what is Demi Lovato”? I *think* my Mum still uses the definite article at the front of Google, too - she “uses The Google”. This is the woman who, when needing to transfer large files of videos and photos to family members elsewhere, says “save it to the sky” (as opposed to “the cloud”).
So it came as a salutary wake-up call to me earlier in the year when I was struggling with some complicated Excel function when working on my laptop at the kitchen table, and, whilst playing with her grandchildren, my Mum said “why don’t you just The ChatGPT?”
Whilst I’m always wary of anecdotes over data, this does speak to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT. As Mary Meeker’s Trends report showed earlier this year, ChatGPT reached a total of 365bn annual searches 5.5x more quickly than Google. Whilst B2B usage of ChatGPT has declined as it’s been increasingly adopted by consumers like my Mum (27% of all search on ChatGPT is B2B, versus 46% a year ago), it’s still an enormous and growing source of answers, information, inspiration and, importantly, recommendation for B2B buyers.
According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 89% of B2B buyers have adopted generative AI (genAI), naming it one of the top sources of self-guided information in each phase of the purchase decision process. And one of the most critical steps in the purchasing journey is the shortlist of potential suppliers.
The latest research from Hard Numbers and our partner Onclusive looks specifically at this. For our “Recommendations in the Age of AI” report, we analysed over 150 global brands to understand how earned media influences category recommendations within large language models (LLMs). We were looking for a direct link between earned media performance and brand recommendations in platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini. We wanted to see if brands with a stronger media presence are more likely to be recommended by LLMs when compared against competitors.
And what we found was that media sentiment, volume and spread all play a role in how brands show up on AI platforms when asked questions which mimic an RFP-style shortlisting process. Here’s some of the headline findings:
Download the full report for yourself here.
And you’ll be in good company, as we have commentary from communications experts from leading companies like iwoca, Intact Insurance; Checkout.com and Procore Technologies, as well as independent practitioners and PR’s “Mr AI” himself, Andrew Bruce Smith.
Take a look at the report, and I’d love to hear your thoughts,
What’s clear from our research, both this report and our first “Reputation in the Age of AI” report, and our work with our clients, is that earned media coverage has a significant impact on how companies show up on AI platforms. It might be talking our own book (it wouldn’t be the first time) but we believe that PR agencies can and should understand this, and understand how generative AI platforms formulate responses to questions, to enable them to best optimise their client’s content to enable it to be found, surfaced and cited in the response.
Just like my own Mum, more and more search and discovery is moving from “The Google” to “The ChatGPT” and other AI platforms. We want to be at the forefront of helping our clients through this change. I hope this research helps you on that journey.
