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Trust is a brand’s most valuable asset. PAN released their annual report on the state of credibility, which is increasingly relevant this year.
If you don’t own your narrative, AI will. Read the report here: Why Credibility Is Your Greatest Strength in an Era of Unverifiable Authenticity: https://lnkd.in/eemmm3j4
Bonus, I had the pleasure of connecting with Mark Nardone, CMO at PAN to discuss credibility. Below please find our full Q&A and you can watch the video here.
Q: A highlight of the BXR report for me was the data and insights around brands gaining visibility but losing conviction. What does that shift mean for PR teams in practical terms?
The drift we're documenting isn't subtle anymore. Brands are reaching more people and saying less to them. What that means practically for PR teams is a fundamental shift in how they think about their work. The outputs they’ve historically been rewarded for — coverage volume, share of voice, author count — can all be moving in the right direction while the brand quietly loses its distinctiveness. The job becomes less about generating mentions and more about shaping meaning: crafting messaging that’s genuinely differentiated, positioning the brand around a story only it can tell, and building real customer relationships that translate into advocacy and trust over time.
The takeaway: PR teams can’t conflate activity with impact. A brand that's being referenced shallowly by a growing number of people isn't necessarily building credibility. It is, undoubtedly, building noise. So, your job shifts from generating mentions to generating meaning. That's a harder brief, for sure.
Q: If reach and conversation volume are becoming weaker indicators, what should communications leaders measure instead to understand whether credibility is actually growing?
I’ll start with a caveat: Buying cycles are increasingly complex, and what works as a credibility signal for one B2B tech brand may not translate for another. But there are patterns in the data worth paying attention to.
What we found is that joy sentiment growth — the emotional tone of what’s actually being said about you — is a stronger predictor than traditional volume metrics like impressions or reach. That matters because it’s a direct window into brand power: how people feel about you. Pair that with author specificity (who is talking about you, not just how many), sentiment quality over time, and leading indicators like share of voice in your category, and you start to build a much more honest picture of credibility. It’s also worth asking where you’re showing up — in which conversations and with what kind of authority. Those signals often tell you more than a spike in coverage volume ever will.
The other thing worth tracking, especially as AI becomes a primary discovery channel, is your citation footprint. Where are you showing up when AI tools construct answers about your category? That’s not a traditional PR metric, but it’s becoming one of the more consequential ones.
Q: The report argues that earned media plays a meaningful role in how AI systems form opinions about brands. How should that change the way PR teams think about media strategy today?
This is one of the findings I think gets underappreciated. When we analyzed the 11,000+ links ChatGPT cited across B2B executive queries, 44% came from PR-influenced sources — earned media, analyst coverage, industry forums.
It’s discussed, pretty widely at this point, how PR paves the way for AI visibility. But I think another question we need to ask is: To what degree does AI devalue the allure of the “tier-one coverage”? Longtail keywords — essentially what AI queries are — lend themselves to more specific, more niche pieces of coverage. You’re not getting that in WSJ, NYT, or Bloomington. That’s where you get into the trade pubs and new media. I think the next 12 months will usher in a pronounced revitalization of verticalized media. And PR teams would be wise to consider that.
Q: What makes a piece of coverage, executive content, or brand proof "citation-worthy" in an environment where AI tools may summarize a company before a buyer ever visits its website?
So much of this is still in flux. GenAI platforms, and Google, have only recently started cracking down on those spammy “Best XYZ Brands for LMNOP” listicles that everyone was posting. Months ago, I would have said that content is technically citation-worthy. I wouldn’t have liked having to say that, but it would have been true.
We have a bit more context now. Not enough to state invariably what you need to do to “rank.” But enough to share some characteristics. So, I’d say that citation-worthy content...
Makes a specific, attributable claim.
Lives in a credible context — a published study, an outlet AI already trusts, a named executive on record.
Reinforces itself in earned media, owned content, and executive voice.
Stakes out a defensible position the brand can actually own over time.
We’re in a zero-click environment where 38% of buyers skip a website entirely because the AI summary already told them what they think they need to know. Citation-worthiness won’t recapture your lost traffic, but it can regain some of the lost influence.
Q: Your findings show that more human, unpolished content earns attention, while more structured content drives clicks. How should PR and executive communications teams sequence those two styles?
The A/B test we ran made this very concrete. Human, unpolished content — specific anecdotes, plainspoken admissions, real friction — generated ten times the engagement rate and held senior buyer attention more than twice as long.
Conversely, polished content drove every single landing page click. Neither worked in isolation.
The sequence matters more than the choice between them. For executive communications, that might mean leading with voice-driven content that earns trust in-feed and then converting that trust with structured, positioned content that gives the reader somewhere to go. Right, left. One without the other leaves you with either attention that goes nowhere or clicks that were never believed in the first place.
Q: The report finds a large trust gap between real customer experiences and influencer content. Are brands overinvesting in influencer visibility and underinvesting in customer proof?
Yes, and the data is pretty unambiguous about it. Eighty-nine percent of consumers say real customer experiences increase their likelihood of considering a product. Only 47% say the same about influencer content. That's a 42-point gap. And it holds — generally — across every demographic we measured (age/gender/etc.).
More importantly for B2B brands: the buyers with the most signing authority are the most resistant to influencers. Boomers resist influencer impact at 80%. Gen X at 57%. These are the people actually approving enterprise deals. A brand that has optimized its credibility strategy for Gen Z receptivity — which skews higher toward influencer trust — may be building in the wrong direction.
The question every CMO should be asking is not "did we reach a big audience?" but "did the buyer who matters believe it?" And, if you’re using influencers to reach non-executives in the buying committee, you need to feel good about those stakeholders’ ability to champion you when it’s time to send RFPs.
Q: If AI tools are misattributing claims, fabricating sources, or getting the brand story wrong, where should PR take the lead in fixing the problem?
There’s no one-time fix. And you can’t always control AI’s hallucinations. But you can limit your risk — by building a credibility infrastructure robust enough that AI has something accurate to work with. That means generating consistent earned media presence in outlets AI already trusts. Drafting executive content that's attributable and on record. Producing owned research that's published and structured in a way AI can parse.
For the fabricated URLs that AI is already generating, redirect them to the most relevant real page on your site. It's not a systemic solution, but it helps recover traffic and trust you'd otherwise lose entirely.
Q: For a communications leader reading this report, what are the first two or three changes you would make to a brand's PR and thought leadership strategy right now?
First, audit your citation footprint before you do anything else. Test what AI platforms are currently saying about your brand. Where are they right? Where are they wrong? What sources are they drawing on? That tells you where your credibility gaps actually are — not where you assume they are.
Second, shift your content investment toward verifiable proof. That means primary research with your name on it, executive voice that's specific and attributable, and customer proof that goes beyond the testimonial page. These are the building blocks AI draws on and the things buyers trust when shortcuts fail them.
Third, sequence your content strategy deliberately. Most teams are running either the attention half or the conversion half — not both, and rarely in the right order. Map where unpolished, human content can earn trust with your key audiences, then make sure structured content is there to convert it. If you're only measuring the clicks, you're missing what made the clicks possible.