News Corp says brand equity matters more than prompts in AI search

News Corp Australia says marketers must start treating AI systems as the first audience for content, revealing it has rebuilt its search operation to compete for visibility inside AI-generated answers rather than traditional search results.

Speaking as part of the publisher's new research briefing, The Prompt, News Corp Australia Head of SEO & Emerging Platforms Mike Cook said the shift has fundamentally changed both how content is discovered and how his team operates.

"Over the last couple of years, my team has been transformed from strict SEO now into search, AI, and emerging platforms," Cook said. "So much so that we now have 12 specialists who are dealing with this every single day across all 22 of our websites."

The research argues the traditional marketing funnel is collapsing as consumers increasingly move from discovery to decision-making within a single AI-powered interaction, often without visiting a website, opening an app or seeing a conventional advertisement.

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News Corp's AI research effort

Cook said News Corp's search team had undertaken extensive testing to understand how large language models discover, rank and cite information.

"We've ended up with around 148,000 cited pages that we're looking at, and this has been analysed for around 10,000 input answers," he said. "So a lot of data that we've worked out. Now, the reason we've done so much experimentation here is we want to find out what works, but also what doesn't work."

Brand equity matters more than prompt engineering

According to Cook, success in AI visibility is largely determined before a user ever enters a prompt.

"The battle is ultimately won before that first prompt has ever been entered," he said. "LLMs do not just invent data. They decide who should rank and who should be cited based on a core system of algorithms."

Rather than focusing solely on technical optimisation, Cook said long-term brand building remains a critical advantage.

"63% of LLMs' visibility actually comes from those long-term equity players," Cook said. "Your brand does matter. How big your digital footprint is will have an impact here. The more well-known or established your brand is through traditional marketing, the better off it will be cited. So, traditional marketing does have an impact when it comes to LLMs."

The briefing cites research indicating that long-term brand equity accounts for 63% of visibility in large language models, with YouTube emerging as the most-cited source in AI-generated responses.

Serving humans and machines

Cook said publishers and marketers are now effectively creating content for two separate audiences.

"We're essentially servicing now two masters," he said. "We still have to consider audiences and humans. We have to create great content for them, but we're now managing bots as well."

News Corp used examples showing AI crawlers struggling to interpret JavaScript-heavy webpages designed primarily for human engagement, reinforcing its argument for "dual publishing" strategies that cater to both people and machines.

Asked how brands can maintain visibility over time, Cook pointed to consistency rather than quick fixes.

"Consistency is actually what beats out when it comes to longevity," he said.

AI competition intensifies

The publisher also argued the AI market is becoming increasingly fragmented.

Drawing on Similarweb data, News Corp said Claude's market share has grown from 3% to 13% over a three-month period, challenging ChatGPT's dominance. At the same time, Google remains the largest source of AI-generated answers, with 1.5 million of its 9.5 million searches per minute now returning AI responses, according to data cited in the briefing.

The report also points to growing automation across the web, citing figures from Cloudflare Radar and Imperva suggesting that 57% of internet traffic is now non-human.

"Your first reader is the AI. Your second reader is the human," the briefing states.

‘News is an AI input company’

News Corp's global chief executive, Robert Thomson, positioned journalism as a foundational ingredient in the AI ecosystem.

"News is an AI Input Company, in the same way that NVIDIA is an AI input company."

The comment reflects News Corp's broader argument that trusted, licensed journalism is becoming increasingly valuable as AI systems seek authoritative sources to train on and cite.

The company also highlighted news.com.au's position as Australia's most-visited news site for ChatGPT referrals during 2025 as evidence of the opportunity.

The briefing concludes with three "no regrets" strategies for brands: invest in brand memorability before consumers reach for AI tools, develop content that serves both human and machine audiences, and focus on being cited within AI responses through trusted expertise, editorial validation and authoritative content.