Hello friends,

It’s been a massive week.

On Wednesday I spoke on a panel at CommsCon with Choice, Capital Brief and Burson on how your reputation in AI directly impacts revenue, hosted a roundtable on why AI just made PR the most important function in the company, and then won PR Professional of the Year at the CommsCon Awards that evening. Last week I also won B&T's Women Leading Tech PR Award.

Big thanks to all of our clients, industry peers and mates for their support. As a new marketing frontier opens up, it has never been a more exciting time to be in PR.

On that note, a few things are happening inside the business right now. We've welcomed two new team members to the LEOPRD pack. Esther Carlson joins us as Growth Consultant, and Louis Roa as Data and AI Lead. The team is growing, and we’ve got a big year ahead.

Also, our next AI visibility report is almost here. Last year's Reputation to Revenue report reached a global audience and we're still hearing people cite it. Version two goes further. If you want to be first in line, join the waitlist here. 🐆

If you haven’t read our first report, have a squiz here.👀 

Until next time,

C and the LEOPRD team x

P.S., I’ll be at Cannes Lions this year. Are you going? Hit me up if so, I’d love to connect.

P.P.S, If you have any burning questions about AI visibility and PR, we should chat. I’d love to hear from you - book a 30 minute discovery call with me here.

Useful stats to have on your radar

The GEO market is projected to hit $33.7 billion by 2034 (USD). It’s valued at $848 million today. 32% of digital marketing leaders have already named it their top priority for 2026, ahead of paid channel spend.

What it means: If you're still treating AI visibility as something to think about later…now later has arrived.

LinkedIn is now one of the most cited domains across major AI search engines for professional queries. Between November 2025 and February 2026, the platform surged from outside the top 20 to rank among the most‑cited sources on ChatGPT and is now the #1 most‑cited domain for professional queries across all AI Search platforms.

What it means: Your executives' LinkedIn presence is a direct input into how AI describes your brand. You need to treat it like infrastructure, because that's exactly what it's become.

Skai surveyed 1,000 US consumers on how generative AI and agentic commerce are reshaping the shopping journey. 92% of consumers who used AI for product research say it influenced what they bought. 73% took further action after an AI recommendation. Comparing products and brands is the number one AI shopping task. 86% of consumers know they can use ChatGPT for shopping, but 30% simply haven't tried.

What it means: Most people aren't avoiding AI for shopping because they don't trust it, but because they just haven't tried it yet. That's a much shorter runway than brands might be hoping for.

What we've been working on

We’re working on several big AI visibility audits for some exciting brands. We've also been getting solid PR results for our clients.

We supported the launch of Positive Energy, Sydney's most design-forward wellness destination. TimeOut Sydney, Concrete Playground, The Daily Telegraph, The Urban List, Russh, Australian Architecture & Design and more. A brand new name and immediate presence. If you’re based in Sydney, check them out @positiveenergy_health_fitness.

We've also been working with Pandion Health, an online telehealth service specialising in ADHD assessment and treatment. Co-founder and psychiatrist Dr Brendan Daugherty is now in Mamamia, Yahoo Lifestyle and HR Leader, covering neurodiversity in the workplace and one insight in particular that keeps landing: motherhood doesn't cause ADHD, but it can be the moment women finally notice it.

On the prowl

AI news you should have firmly on your radar.

OpenAI is bringing ads to ChatGPT in Australia in the coming weeks, limited to logged-in adult users on the free and Go tiers. But how often do you actually scroll past the ads? OpenAI has confirmed that recommended answers remain independent and unbiased, which means the brands showing up organically are there on merit, not budget. What drives that merit is earned media, third-party credibility and authority signals. Our Reputation to Revenue report has the data on exactly what gets a brand cited inside AI.

Amazon just launched Health AI to all US consumers. Previously available only to One Medical members, Amazon's Health AI assistant is now live on Amazon.com and the Amazon app. It answers health questions, explains medical records, books appointments, manages prescriptions and connects users to clinicians. What's striking is the pace of competition: five major AI platforms now have dedicated consumer health products, including ChatGPT Health, Copilot Health and Perplexity Health, all arriving within three months of each other. In the US, 3 in 5 adults already used AI tools for health purposes in the past three months, which tells you this isn't a trend in the making, it's already here.

Semrush analysed 325,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. The finding that should be on every comms leader's desk: LinkedIn was the second most cited source for AI answers, just behind Reddit. This means that your executives' LinkedIn presence is directly shaping how AI describes your organisation, which makes it a PR and comms problem as much as a marketing one.

Claude can now control your computer. Anthropic launched computer use this week for Claude Cowork and Claude Code, giving Claude the ability to point, click, navigate and complete tasks across your desktop autonomously. It’s paired with Dispatch, which lets you assign tasks from your phone, and you can brief Claude on the train and return to finished work on your desk.

OpenAI has shut down Sora. The AI video app launched six months ago, went viral almost immediately, and has now collapsed. Monthly active users peaked in December and downloads fell 45% by February, and Disney's $1 billion investment deal, signed just three months ago, is off. What the Sora story really tells us has nothing to do with video. A product that captures attention without earning retention will always run out of road, and the brands and platforms that compound over time are the ones with something genuinely useful to say, not just something visually arresting to show.

Anthropic published new research this week based on one million sampled Claude conversations, and the headline finding is worth paying attention to is this: 49% of occupations have now seen at least 25% of their tasks performed using AI, and management tasks nearly doubled in three months. Perhaps most interesting is the learning curve finding that users who have been on the platform for six months or more have a 10% higher success rate in their conversations, which suggests the teams investing in AI capability now are compounding an advantage that will be very hard to close later.

OpenAI scaled back ChatGPT's Instant Checkout earlier this month after only a dozen merchants went live. Then this week at ShopTalk, they announced a rebuild. The new experience is visual and interactive, powered directly by merchant data through the Agentic Commerce Protocol. You can browse products side by side with prices, specs and reviews inline, upload a photo to find similar items across retailers, and complete purchases on retailer websites rather than inside the chat. Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Best Buy, The Home Depot and Wayfair are already integrated, and Shopify is activating agentic storefronts by default for all stores. What this means is that OpenAI has stopped trying to own the transaction and moved to owning the discovery moment instead, which is a more defensible position and a more useful one for brands to understand. A big consideration here for comms and marketing leaders is that your visibility in ChatGPT shopping now depends on clean product data, structured schema and strong third-party reviews.

Coming soon: Reputation to Revenue 2.0

Our next AI visibility report is almost here. The first edition reached a global audience and we're still hearing people cite it. Version two goes further, with new data on how brands actually get surfaced inside AI, what signals drive inclusion versus exclusion, and why most businesses are invisible without knowing it.

If you want to be first in line when it drops, join the waitlist here.