AI shapes perception – ensure it shapes yours

In 2026, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) AI is increasingly shaping your brand before anyone sees it. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini are becoming the first stop for patients, clinicians, policymakers, and journalists. In healthcare, this means your story is summarised, interpreted, and presented by AI, often before stakeholders visit your website or see a news story.

These GenAI systems do not just surface links. They synthesise information across reputable platforms, compare competitors, and generate authoritative-sounding summaries in real-time.

For leaders in pharmaceutical, medtech, and biotech, this raises a crucial question: if AI is shaping how your brand or organisation is perceived, how much influence do you have over what it sees?

AI – THE NEW FRONT DOOR TO YOUR BRAND

To answer this question, brands must first understand the scale and behavioural shift of AI-guided discovery. GenAI platforms drove more than 1.13 billion referral visits to major global websites in June 2025, with growth accelerating rapidly. While traditional search remains dominant in overall volume, AI-led referrals represent a very different kind of interaction – one shaped by natural-language prompts, contextual comparison, and synthesised authority.

Users are no longer scanning a list of links. They are receiving narrative summaries, and it is those summaries that influence publicity and reputation.

In healthcare, these AI-driven searches often occur at moments of consequence:

• Patients researching symptoms or treatment pathways;
• Clinicians comparing data;
• Policy makers reviewing evidence; and
• Journalists seeking expert commentary.

In each of these scenarios, stakeholders may encounter an AI synthesis before they encounter a primary source.

What surfaces in that response is drawn from a network of content sources, including native website content, peer-reviewed publications, media coverage, backlinks, broadcast references and social discourse. These are the data signals that LLMs interpret and distil into answers.

For healthcare organisations operating in highly regulated environments, such as Australia – where engagement with bodies like the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and reimbursement pathways involving the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) shape market access – how information is summarised and contextualised matters.

Monitoring how an organisation appears within LLM systems is not simply a digital analytics task. It directly affects how stakeholders are influenced and how reputation is formed.

If AI is deciding which information is prioritise, and how your story is summarised, healthcare communicators need to understand not just what it says about their organisation, but also why.

HOW PUBLICITY FEEDS AI

The dynamic of brands influencing LLM outputs via earned media is already visible in practice. In 2025, VIVA! Communications supported the launch of the InsideOut Institute for Eating Disorders eClinic– a digital care pathway designed to expand access to evidence-based eating disorder treatment. The campaign was structured around authoritative, research-led storytelling, with coverage secured across national television, online, print, radio, podcasts and influencer channel endorsements, including reporting by The Guardian.

As a result of the content published during the media launch, AI-generated responses to condition and treatment-related queries began referencing the eClinic and its treatment programs, with systems drawing directly from published news coverage when synthesising answers.

The above image demonstrates an AI-generated response referencing a piece of coverage we secured in The Guardian from the InsideOut Institute eClinic national media launch

This search example illustrates a broader structural shift. Media coverage no longer functions only at the moment of publication. Today, publicity becomes a persistent signal – resurfaced, synthesised and reinterpreted within LLM-generated responses long after the original article is published. It becomes part of a wider information web that AI systems reference, summarise and redistribute over time. Earned credibility increases the likelihood that an organisation’s evidence, positioning and purpose are accurately represented when interpreted by generative engines.

HOW ONLINE CONVERSATIONS SHAPE AI RESPONSES

While top-tier media coverage contributes authority signals, generative engines do not rely exclusively on institutional sources. Increasingly, platforms such as Reddit and X form part of conversational layers from which AI systems synthesise sentiment and frame lived experience. User-generated discussions, patient forums, and real-time commentary can influence how conditions, treatments, and organisations are contextualised within AI-generated responses.

In healthcare, where peer experience and community dialogue often shape decision-making alongside clinical evidence, this dynamic is central to perception.

Public voices can shape conversations regarding treatment access, adverse events (AEs), and service experience. These conversations become part of the wider information ecosystem that LLMs draw on to generate responses.

Across 2025, GenAI adoption reached mainstream levels, with surveys showing up to ~40 per cent of users actively using AI into search behaviour, and the substantial majority (79 per cent) expecting to use AI-enhanced search soon.

One study found that 37 per cent of consumers begin their information search with AI tools rather than traditional search engines – suggesting a behavioural inflection point in how authoritative information is found and interpreted.

SHAPING YOUR BRAND IN AN AI WORLD

For healthcare communicators, the implication is clear: brand reputation is no longer shaped solely by formal announcements or structured coverage. In an LLM-driven environment, reputation is influenced by the full spectrum of publicity – sustained media presence, expert commentary, advocacy, critique, and patient voice – all of which input into AI-generated narratives.

Monitoring how your publicity appears in LLM responses is now essential. But monitoring alone is not enough. AI-led discovery is a new reputation environment. Communicators must understand the signals shaping how their brand is interpreted, summarised, and presented to audiences.

In an AI-mediated landscape, brands cannot afford to be passively interpreted. They must be deliberate about how their story is built, which means:

• Aligning earned media to clear evidence and messaging;
• Ensuring consistency across credible sources; and
• Regularly reviewing how AI platforms summarise your organisation.

AI-led discovery is now pivotal to reputation. For pharmaceutical, medtech, and biotech leaders across Australia and Asia Pacific, the question is no longer whether AI shapes perception, but whether you are proactively shaping the information it draws from.

VIVA! Communications partners with clients to develop communications strategies grounded in purpose, audience insight, and measurable intent. If you’re considering how AI-generated responses reflect your brand, we’d love to talk.