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The article was originally published on Campaign Middle East.

If you’re working in a digital comms agency right now, you’ll realise this idea – we can’t just buy our way to visibility – is the 2026 version of the “we need more followers” conversation.

Today, our clients’ reputations are now in the hands of an ask anything chat box that we can’t control. We see the output, we don’t like it, and our instinct is to apply old logic: buy an ad or stuff some keywords.

And yes, if you haven’t heard already, to paraphrase Game of Thrones, “ads are coming.”

Gold buys the spotlight

ChatGPT and Perplexity are introducing sponsored citations, enabling you to buy visibility (not validity). Yet there’s a surprisingly common belief that paid media will save organic reputation.

Sorry to break it to you–in the age of Large Language Models (LLM’s), it won’t.

It’s key to understand how LLMs work. They don’t read your website like a human does and decide if they like it. They predict the next most likely word, based on patterns they’ve learned from large amounts of text that they have been (and will continue being) trained on over time.

Buying ads quite frankly ignores the reality these models rely on. AI models don’t just use your website; they pull information from across the web to form their answers. If your brand lives only on your own great website, with no external validation, you’re not worthy of an AI citation.

Fixing this pain point starts with realisation. The realisation that you cannot optimise an LLM by simply buying a sponsored citation. An LLM is not another Google search. The user reads the answer first, before any ad. Imagine paying for your ad to sit next to a response that isn’t exactly in your favour. Whoops… embarrassing.

Only trust claims the throne

You can pay for attention, but not for machine trust. LLMs organise information into entities, people, brands and places.If the model doesn’t understand what your brand is, it won’t risk recommending it in the main text, regardless of your ad budget. So how do we fix this?

Here are three tips that we’ve seen prove consistent results:

1. Fix your coding first: AI models can tell the difference between a product and a blog post. If your key selling points aren’t clearly coded, the system can misread your content.
2. Invest in digital PR: LLMs feed off high-quality mentions. If the only place that says you are a “luxury leader” is your own ad copy, the AI treats it as a claim, not a fact.
3. Keep a close eye on hallucinations: Often overlooked, but this should be a critical part of your comms strategy and reporting. You need to know what the AI thinks is true about you before you advertise.

The ads are coming

Yes, it’s inevitable. However, buying paid ads on the likes of ChatGPT or Perplexity is not going to get you and your organisation seen more. It’s not going to fix your problems.

What will help you, is digging deeper and fixing the roots.

Originally published on Campaign Middle East.

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