Rethinking Audiences: AI is now at the Table
Ally MacLellan
AI has rapidly become a central force in modern communications, transforming how we craft, target, and evaluate messaging across audiences. Now, LLMs (Large Language Models) and conversational AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, as well as AI Overviews in search engines like Google, are also an audience, and perhaps the most important of them all.
LLMs have reshaped how your audiences discover, engage with, and interpret information. This isn’t “coming soon”; it’s “here now.” To remain relevant, organizations must treat AI as a new trifecta of audience, influencer and channel. For communicators who have always worked to structure and maintain messaging for a variety of audiences, such as stakeholders, journalists, customers, and, more recently, search engines, this evolving space represents both opportunities and risks that need to be considered and actioned.
AI as an Audience: It’s Already ‘Reading’ Your Content
Generative AI tools constantly ingest and summarize content from public sources, including websites, press releases, social media and news sources. AI systems don’t read like humans; they rely on signals such as clarity, structure, context, and consistency to interpret the content. If your organization’s content is confusing, inconsistent, buried in PDFs or full of jargon, AI may skip it, or worse, misrepresent it.
Google’s AI Overviews are responding to almost 55% of Google searches, so it’s likely this is where your organization is showing up. If your audience is looking for you on mobile, 81% of queries will result in an AI overview. Our 2025 CanTrust Index™ reveals that 66% of Canadian Gen Z and 55% of Canadian Millennials declare themselves as regular AI users, so your organization needs to show up in the tools they’re using!
AI as an Influencer: Shaping Perceptions before Contact
When your audience or stakeholders run a Google search or ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question about your organization, competitors, sector, or key topic, the answers they receive shape their first impressions before they interact with any of your owned touchpoints. This matters because AI may prioritize unexpected or non-authoritative sources, like consumer forums or outdated news articles. If your owned content isn’t optimized for AI, or you haven’t been mentioned in an earned source recently, you may not be seen by AI. AI is a powerful, yet invisible influencer in decision-making, reputation, and trust.
A colleague was recently listening to a podcast about tariffs and headed to Google to learn more about whether it was true that Canada was ‘dumping’ lumber in the US. The first source cited by the AI Overview is the U.S. Lumber Coalition, a lobby group. At that time, their website wasn’t listed in the top five search results for that query. Yet, it was being pulled in by AI Overviews, which confidently started its answer with “Yes, the US lumber industry alleges that Canada is dumping subsidized lumber into the US market.” This organization discovered how to optimize its owned content to appear in AI Overviews. As a result, many readers may have stopped after the first sentence and not clicked through to learn more from other sources, such as Global Affairs Canada, which presents a distinctly different point of view.
AI as a Channel: Where Discovery Happens
Even if it is unintentional, AI answers are fast becoming audiences’ first and last stop for information, acting as a new kind of content distribution channel. With 69% of Google Searches in May 2025 ending without a single click, your audience is often getting the information they think they need without clicking through to your content. With more informational searches shifting to LLMs like ChatGPT, questions like “Which weight loss medication has the fewest side effects?” are getting answered without people ever having to directly read content at the source. These overviews and answers summarize content from across the internet, and your organization’s visibility depends on where your content is located and how it’s structured, cited, and surfaced. Optimizing for AI as a channel requires some technical setup, like SEO, but where and how your content appears is just as important for Generative Engine Optimization.
Generative AI is now a real, active and highly influential authority in shaping the perception of your brand, organization or leaders. If you’ve already learned to prompt and interact with AI tools, it’s now time to consider how your organization shows up when others prompt about your organization. Treating AI as an audience, influencer, and channel reframes how we need to think about content strategy, quality, and discoverability. If you’re not actively shaping your visibility in AI outputs, someone (or something) else is doing it for you – and likely not to your benefit.
At Proof Strategies, we work with organizations and brands to understand how audiences are impacted and leverage AI to position their brand, identifying the content strategies needed to work effectively for both humans and machines. Whether your organization has just started to consider the impact of AI on your audience or is actively looking at AI visibility and communications opportunities, let’s talk!
The image for this article was created using ChatGPT with the prompt: A 2D digital illustration showing a friendly, classic-style robot sitting at a boardroom table with four human professionals. The robot features expressive eyes and a white-and-blue, rounded design, giving it a warm and approachable appearance. The humans are identifiable as businesspeople but are drawn with minimal detail. The setting is a modern boardroom featuring a wooden conference table, coffee mugs, papers, a presentation screen on the wall, and large windows that offer a view of the cityscape. The style is polished and professional, yet slightly playful and illustrative, characterized by clean lines and warm tones.