Your digital PR is getting coverage. But is AI seeing that coverage?
We analysed 3,500 links across 170 brands and 224 digital PR campaigns and found 4 in 10 Digital PR links were invisible to AI. How is your brand performing for AI? We built the tool to find out.
Introducing Brand Citation Score – the tool that will audit your link profile and make every link work for AI.
links with a high Brand Citation Score are 4.75x more likely to survive AI summarisation
verifiable digital PR links analysed across 224 campaigns and 170 brands
of brand mentions dropped by AI when summarising the article
C3 Research Report 2026
The largest study of digital PR and AI summarisation ever run
We analysed 3,500+ verifiable digital PR links across 170 brands, 224 campaigns and 2,300+ publisher domains. Every link was run through LLMs to test whether the brand survived AI summarisation.
AI Summarisation is what happens when an AI reads a piece of coverage and condenses it into an answer, summary, or search-style response. If your brand isn’t prominent enough in the article, AI understands the story but leaves your brand out of the answer entirely.
Here is what we found:
- 43% of brand mentions were not retained when AI summarised the article
- Articles with a high Brand Citation Score are 4.75x more likely to survive AI summarisation
- Standard PR measurement frameworks cannot see this gap at all
The problem
A link that exists is not the same as a brand that AI remembers
LLMs don’t rank pages. They interpret meaning. When AI summarises a piece of coverage, it decides which brands, entities and ideas are central enough to include. If your brand is not prominent enough in the article – even if the link exists – AI leaves it out of the answer.
We’re not just building links. We’re building coverage that LLMs remember. And right now, 43% of digital PR coverage is failing that test.
Our tool
Introducing the Brand Citation Score
We built a proprietary measurement tool that analyses the full text of earned media placements using Natural Language Processing – extracting signals like entity salience, brand prominence, contextual relevance and narrative framing. We measure not just what you earned, but how hard it works for AI.
Our Brand Citation Score analyses your earned media for the exact signals driving AI retention. We embed it into every campaign we run, so our clients’ coverage works harder for AI than anyone else’s.
Measure: Brand prominence scoring
How centrally is your brand positioned in the article? Headline mention, direct quote, expert positioning or buried at paragraph nine?
Analyse: Semantic signal strength
Which topics and entities appear alongside your brand? Are they building the right associations? We map your semantic footprint across earned media.
Track: LLM citation likelihood
We score each placement against the signals that make AI systems more likely to surface and retain your brand in generated responses.
Report: GEO impact over time
Coverage is language data. We track how your semantic footprint evolves and how it correlates with LLM share of voice across platforms.
The data
The higher your Brand Citation Score, the more likely AI remembers your brand
We scored every article using our Brand Citation Score – a proprietary NLP-based measure of brand prominence. Then we tested whether the brand survived AI summarisation. The results are stark.
Brand Citation Score study findings
| BCS Band | Survival Rate | What this means |
|---|---|---|
| 0-25 (Low) | 14.72% | Brand almost always dropped by AI – coverage exists but AI ignores the brand |
| 25-50 | 29.46% | Brand survives less than 1 in 3 AI summaries |
| 50-75 | 55.20% | Brand retained in majority of AI summaries |
| 75-100 (High) | 69.95% | Brand cited in nearly 7 in 10 AI summaries |
What our team say
“Digital PR is no longer just about earning links. It’s about building coverage that LLMs remember. Our study shows that more than 4 in 10 placements are currently failing that test because the brand is not prominent enough for AI to treat it as important. With our new tool, we can now track this and ensure that all PR placements are working as hard as possible, not only for Google but also for LLMs.”
David White
Chief Growth Officer – Connective3
Free analysis
See how your coverage performs for AI
We’ll run your existing digital PR through our Brand Citation Score. You’ll see exactly which coverage is working for AI – and which is invisible.