Once upon a time, visibility meant being on the first page of Google. Now, for many brands, it means being inside ChatGPT’s response.
That’s the bet behind Zen Media’s new AI-native PR model, Published Monthly, which officially launched this week. The Las Vegas–based communications agency says its new system ensures companies appear not just in search results, but in the AI-generated answers that increasingly guide buying decisions.
“Visibility used to mean ranking in Google,” says Duran Inci, Zen Media’s CEO. “Now it means appearing in AI answers.”
The Shift: From SEO to “Answer Share”
When a potential customer asks a chatbot, “What are the top B2B PR agencies using AI?” or “Which compliance platforms are best for enterprises?”, large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity no longer display a list of links, they synthesize answers.
If a brand isn’t mentioned in those summaries, it might as well be invisible.
Zen’s new platform measures that exposure with a proprietary metric called Answer Share — the percentage of AI-generated answers where a brand appears. Using its Discovery Prompt Index, Zen analyzes thousands of real-world AI prompts to see where a client shows up, where competitors dominate, and what content gaps are causing invisibility.
“The Discovery Prompt Index shows where brands are missing, the GenAI Site Audit fixes the technical gaps, and the content we publish ensures visibility that AI can recognize and retrieve,” says Sarah Evans, Zen’s Partner and Head of PR.
Every 28 Days, a New Cycle of Visibility
Published Monthly revives a classic newsroom cadence, the 28-day news cycle, and applies it to the AI era. Each month, Zen produces one to two press-ready stories crafted for both journalists and AI indexing.
Those stories are distributed through earned media relationships and paired with technical updates, schema markup, FAQs, and entity tags, to make sure AI crawlers “see” the content correctly.
Zen tracks the results through quarterly Answer Share reports, showing exactly how often brands appear inside generative answers over time.
The company piloted the system on itself, boosting its AI visibility from 21% to 72% across ChatGPT and Gemini within three cycles, a 51-point lift in under three months. Early clients in commerce, AI, and healthcare have reportedly seen similar jumps.
Inside the 7-Step System
Zen’s process weaves together media strategy and AI optimization:
- Map 1,000+ real buyer prompts using the Discovery Prompt Index.
- Identify high-intent themes where the brand should appear.
- Run a GenAI Site Audit to check schema, FAQ, backlinks, and entity data.
- Craft AI-friendly, journalist-ready headlines and stories.
- Secure earned media placements across tech and trade outlets.
- Apply structured markup and FAQs to client websites.
- Measure Answer Share growth and competitive gaps quarterly.
Pricing starts at $5,000 per month (12-month commitment) or $7,500 for a 90-day pilot.
The Bigger Play: Generative Commerce
Zen’s founder and chief visionary officer, Shama Hyder, calls it the natural evolution of public relations: from search visibility to answer credibility.
“PR has always been about trust,” Hyder says. “Now that trust must exist inside AI. If ChatGPT can’t recognize your authority, you don’t have it.”
The trend is part of what analysts are calling “generative commerce” — a shift where discovery and recommendation increasingly happen through AI assistants instead of browsers.
For brands, that means the traditional PR playbook, such as product launches, one-off announcements, and bursts of coverage, may no longer be enough. What’s needed, Hyder argues, is continuous visibility tuned to how AI systems read and recall information.
Why It Matters
Industry observers say the stakes are high. As generative models become the default interface for search, being cited (or omitted) could directly affect sales.
“Generative AI is now a gatekeeper,” says Inci. “If you’re not part of the data that feeds it, you don’t just lose ranking, you lose relevance.”
With Published Monthly, Zen is betting that PR, once measured in impressions and sentiment, can now be quantified in AI presence.
