Digital PR When AI Answers First: A Conversation With Carolina Rimondi

A luxury hotel on the Italian coast had built its proposition around highly personalised leisure services. When Digital PR strategist Carolina Rimondi looked at how LLMs described it, they returned something else: an eco-resort.

Sustainability mattered to the brand. It was not what made the property distinctive, and it was not what its sales strategy was built on. The description was confident, fluent, and wrong.

That gap is the reason this conversation exists. Digital PR in AI search isn't only a measurement problem, it's a design problem, and Rimondi has been working on it in practice with clients across hospitality, fashion and design.

Why This Conversation, and Why Now

The behaviour has already moved. Allianz Partners' 2026 Global Travel Confidence Index, polled by Ipsos, found that 37% of Americans planning summer travel were using AI to help plan their trips, from destination and restaurant recommendations to itineraries and budgets.

The commercial consequence is measurable too. The BoF x McKinsey State of Fashion 2026 reports that 53% of consumers who search with AI go on to buy with it, and that more than 40% trust AI answers more than paid advertising.

Search itself hasn't collapsed. It still accounts for roughly 80% of traffic, which makes this a window rather than a cliff. Market forecasts put GEO, the discipline of optimising how AI systems find, understand and represent a brand, at roughly $1B in 2025 and heading towards $17B by 2034.

For earned media, the practical question is narrower and harder: when an AI assembles an answer about your category, which sources is it reading, and what do they say about you?

Rimondi's answers below are published as she wrote them, with light edits for flow only.

The Shift: Designing Digital PR Differently, Not Just Measuring It Differently

Search Bridge: In your post you drew a distinction: this isn't only about measuring PR differently, it's about designing Digital PR strategy differently. What led you to that realisation, and why is AI search the specific force making it unavoidable now?

Carolina Rimondi: Digital PR must not lose sight of tangible outcomes along the way. Working on visibility and reputation should deliver real benefits for the brand, such as stronger awareness and a better perception among its stakeholders.

Today, more than ever, this can be both measured and strategically designed. We can understand what people are searching for about a brand through LLMs, see the answers these models provide, and identify the specific sources they rely on.

A large part of the information needed to build an effective Digital PR strategy is already there. But of course, it requires ongoing analysis to monitor and interpret that information properly. It is far from simple.

Search Bridge: Was there a concrete moment, a client result, a placement that behaved in a way you didn't expect, when this became something you were sure of?

Carolina Rimondi: Yes. A luxury hotel with a very specific and distinctive value proposition, built around highly personalised leisure services for a seaside holiday in Italy, was being described by LLMs almost exclusively as an eco-resort.

Sustainability was certainly important to the brand, but not to the extent that it should define the hotel's positioning or set it apart from competitors as an eco-resort. The way LLMs presented the property to people searching for it was therefore quite far removed from what actually made the hotel distinctive in both its sales strategy and its communication.

What Is Source Intelligence in Digital PR?

Search Bridge: You argued it's no longer enough to target the best-known or most authoritative outlets. What matters is understanding which sources AI engines draw on for a given question. Can you elaborate on what source intelligence is and how to approach it?

Carolina Rimondi: Source intelligence starts with a clear definition of the target audience, because AI search is not entirely neutral. The sources surfaced can vary depending on factors such as geography, language, the way a question is phrased, the context of the conversation and, in some cases, user history or personalisation.

So the first step is to identify precise audience clusters and then map the kinds of questions each of them is likely to ask. From there, the analysis should not rely on a single prompt or a single AI response. The same or similar queries need to be tested repeatedly across different AI engines, audience profiles, markets and stages of the customer journey.

To do this properly, Digital PR professionals need to rely on dedicated tools that can systematically map sources, track recurring patterns and monitor the KPIs defined at the beginning of the intelligence process. Those KPIs might include source frequency, brand mentions, competitor presence, narrative consistency, topic association or source gaps. The technology is important, but it is the PR professional who decides what needs to be measured and how those signals should be interpreted.

This is where sector-specific Digital PR expertise becomes essential. Knowing the market in depth helps distinguish influential sources from incidental ones, identify the real opinion leaders, understand which topics and narratives are gaining relevance, and turn the data into actionable PR intelligence.

For me, source intelligence is therefore not simply about finding out where AI gets its information. It is about mapping the information ecosystem around a brand: understanding which sources repeatedly shape AI answers for specific audiences and questions, where competitors are stronger, where the brand is absent or misrepresented, and which narratives are driving that representation.

Those gaps can then inform the PR strategy itself: which media or experts to prioritise, which stories to develop, which messages need reinforcing and where the brand needs stronger or more accurate representation.

The key point is that this analysis has to be ongoing. AI answers and the sources behind them are not fixed, so source intelligence should be treated as a continuous process of monitoring, interpretation and strategic adjustment rather than a one-off audit.

Two structural points sit inside that answer, and both change how a media list is built.

How Do GEO and Digital PR Work Together?

Search Bridge: You described Digital PR and GEO starting to work together, PR building an authoritative editorial presence, GEO revealing how that presence is recognised and valued by the engines. How would you explain the importance of tracking a brand's GEO efforts?

Carolina Rimondi: GEO and Digital PR work best together because they act on two different but connected levels.

GEO improves how clearly a brand and its content can be discovered, understood and retrieved by AI systems. Digital PR strengthens the external information ecosystem around that brand through relevant media, expert voices and authoritative third-party sources.

Source intelligence connects the two: it shows which sources and narratives are actually influencing AI answers, allowing PR activity to focus on the most relevant gaps while GEO ensures the brand's owned content is equally clear and consistent.

In short, GEO optimises how the brand is understood; Digital PR strengthens what the wider web says about it.

Flipping the Brief: Starting From the Questions, Not the Agenda

Search Bridge: One of your sharpest points: for years PR started from the brand's agenda, "this is what we want to say." You think it now has to start from the questions customers ask along their decision journey. How do you find those questions, and then reconcile them with what the brand wants to be known for?

Carolina Rimondi: The answer lies in mapping the target audience. Media are more likely to cover a brand when they are offered stories that reflect relevant consumer trends, emerging topics and what that audience is actively searching for.

Since a growing share of this information-seeking now happens through LLMs, these environments can provide useful signals for a PR brief. But this should not be based on manually querying LLMs and drawing conclusions from a few answers. Source intelligence requires dedicated tools that monitor sources, narratives and KPIs at scale, while the PR professional defines what to measure and interprets the results. This brings us back to the point I made about source intelligence above.

Narrative mapping is equally important. If I want to position a hotel as a wellness resort on the Amalfi Coast, but the monitored sources consistently describe it as a family hotel, that reveals a clear narrative gap. The PR brief should work to close that gap through the right stories, messages and sources.

Search Bridge: You used hotellerie as an example: being present in the right sources so a brand enters the customer's consideration before they ever reach a website or an OTA. What does that shift look like in practice?

Carolina Rimondi: Recent research shows that around one in three travellers in the US and Europe already use LLMs to plan or enhance their trips.

This is particularly interesting if we look at it through the lens of Google's "messy middle". The original model described the space between a trigger and a purchase as a continuous loop between exploration and evaluation: people discover options, compare them, seek reassurance, go back to search, and gradually narrow their choices.

LLMs do not remove that messy middle. They compress it and make it conversational.

A traveller who once moved across Google searches, editorial articles, review platforms, hotel websites and OTAs can now conduct much of that exploration and evaluation within a single AI conversation. They can start with a broad request, add preferences and constraints, compare alternatives and refine the shortlist without ever visiting a brand website.

So the key change is not simply that there is a new search channel. AI is becoming an intermediary inside the consideration process itself, filtering and synthesising information before the traveller reaches a website or an OTA.

The compression Rimondi describes has a specific consequence for enterprise teams. When exploration and evaluation happen inside one conversation, the brand's own site is no longer where the shortlist is formed. The shortlist is formed from whatever the model can retrieve and trusts, which is why the sources behind the answer are now a media planning input rather than a reporting footnote.

The KPI That Doesn't Exist Yet

Search Bridge: You called the new measure, how much PR contributes to a brand's presence in AI-generated answers, an open challenge. What would a genuinely useful version of that metric look like to you, and what are you experimenting with in the meantime?

Carolina Rimondi: I believe it is useful to shift the paradigm when measuring the success of a PR strategy in AI search: the question is not simply how visible a brand is, but how it is represented and in relation to which specific audiences.

It is important to remember that we are not talking about "doing PR for the algorithm". The goal is to ensure that the authoritative sources within our audience's information ecosystem contain an accurate, relevant and distinctive representation of the brand.

From there, dedicated monitoring tools can be used to define and track KPIs over time, always within a clearly identified target audience. These may include brand awareness, consideration, narrative consistency, competitive positioning and other relevant indicators.

That reframing, from visibility to representation, is the same conclusion the platform side of this problem keeps arriving at. Presence in an answer says a brand was retrievable. It says nothing about whether the description that came with it was accurate, distinctive, or the one the commercial strategy depends on.

Where Search Bridge Fits

Search Bridge: Since you framed GEO as the discipline that reveals how editorial presence is recognised by the engines, that's exactly the gap Search Bridge sits in. What have you found useful in the platform, which features do you reach for most, and what do they let you see or do that you couldn't before?

Carolina Rimondi: The greatest value Search Bridge can bring to a Digital PR strategy lies in its ability to map relevant sources through the lens of specific target audiences, detailed queries and competitor analysis.

This provides a clear view of the brand's narrative context, highlighting gaps, opportunities and strategic insights that can directly inform the PR brief.

It also enables the definition and ongoing monitoring of key KPIs, making it possible to assess the effectiveness of PR actions over time and adjust the strategy accordingly.

Search Bridge is AI Representation Intelligence for enterprise marketing teams, and the work Rimondi describes maps onto how Multi-Signal Intelligence is built. Three tracking layers, correlated into one picture.

What This Means for Enterprise Marketing Teams

Five things worth taking from Rimondi's account.

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About

Carolina Rimondi is the founder of Human Strategies Boutique, a communication agency specialising in Digital PR, social media management and content creation, working with brands across fashion, luxury, design and hospitality.

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Sources: BoF x McKinsey State of Fashion (2026), Allianz Partners Global Travel Confidence Index with Ipsos (2026), Think with Google "messy middle" research (2020), GEO market forecasts (2025).