Forbes Says PR Now Drives AI Search. The SEO Crowd Did Not See It Coming. Predictable.
Ohad Ben Artzi, founder and CEO of OBA PR and OBA Circle, argues in a Forbes Council Post that PR and SEO have merged in 2026. His claim is that companies that understood SEO's compounding logic early built lasting traffic advantages, and the same dynamic now applies to AI-generated answers. The inputs driving AI visibility, he says, are credibility, consistency, and third-party validation.
The mental model here is input determinism. Generative AI answers are shaped by what exists in the training corpus and the retrieval layer. You cannot optimize your way into a synthesis engine the way you could game a ranking algorithm. What you can do is ensure credible third parties have published credible things about you. The mechanism is earned media compounding into AI visibility. PR always mattered. Now it matters in a system you cannot directly manipulate.
Ohad Ben Artzi runs OBA PR and OBA Circle and wrote the Forbes Council piece making this argument. He is also described as a seasoned financial investor, for whatever that is worth to you.
- Search your company name on Perplexity and note which third-party sources it cites when describing you.
- Identify the two or three publications most frequently cited and check whether they have ever covered your brand. If not, that is your gap.
- Draft a short pitch to one journalist at one of those publications about something genuinely newsworthy your company did. The goal is not a link. The goal is becoming a source the AI engine trusts.