Nobody owns AI visibility yet.

A new job appeared in corporate comms this year. In most companies, nobody has been given it.

Michael Reaney  ·  28 July 2026  ·  3 min read

The numbers

Muck Rack surveyed 971 PR professionals in May and June 2026. 73% call visibility in AI answers important. 29% say nobody in their organisation owns it. 39% are not measuring it at all. The gap between “this matters” and “someone is responsible for it” is the finding.

One more number from the same study deserves attention: 99% of the sources AI assistants cite are earned media. Not advertising, and not your own channels.

Why earned media decides it

That 99% explains how the assistants behave. They quote people who have said something worth quoting in credible places. A press release rarely qualifies. A leader with a clear, original position, published or quoted somewhere with standing, does. If your leaders publish nothing worth citing, there is nothing to cite, and no amount of brand content fixes that.

The ownership question

It is tempting to treat AI visibility as a tool purchase, because tools are easy to buy and responsibility is not. But the work is closer to a monitoring discipline than a technology: ask the assistants the questions your buyers actually ask, read the answers, notice who is present and who is absent, and feed that back into what your leaders say publicly. That is comms work, whether or not it has a name on the org chart yet.

How we think about it

We run visibility scans for enterprises and ask the assistants our buyers’ questions as part of the routine. The shape barely changes from scan to scan: the company is described accurately, and the leaders are absent from the answers buyers actually see. Findable as a brand, invisible as people. It is a fixable gap, but only once someone owns it.