I’ve spent over two decades telling clients where their story needs to show up. Right now, a lot of them are asking the wrong question. They ask me how to get covered by a magazine, or how to get on a morning show, or how to fix a bad review. Fair questions. But there’s a new gatekeeper standing in front of all of it, and most brands haven’t figured out it exists. Parents used to start shopping for a stroller with a friend’s word, a magazine review, or a walk through a baby store. Now a lot of them just ask ChatGPT. Adobe found that AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites jumped 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026. Nearly four in ten shoppers Adobe surveyed said they’ve used AI to shop, and 85% of those said it made the experience better. That’s not a trend anymore. That’s how people buy things now.
My firm just put out a research report on baby brand discovery, because parenting and baby products are a category where trust decides everything, and nobody has time to dig through ten browser tabs at 2 a.m. with a crying newborn. What we found applies well beyond diapers and bottles. Here’s the part that should worry every brand I work with: before a parent ever sees an AI-generated answer about the best bottle for a gassy baby, the AI has already made a decision about which brands are even in the running. We call it a selection funnel: eligibility, retrieval, consideration, representation, recommendation. Five gates. A brand can get filtered out at any one of them, and the consumer never even knows it was in the mix.
That means the old PR playbook still matters, it’s just not enough by itself anymore. A great magazine placement doesn’t just build your reputation with a reader. It becomes a source document that an AI model retrieves, evaluates, and either uses to describe your product correctly, or ignores because your product page never explained it clearly enough. Earned media, in our research, was the single strongest signal we found for whether a brand gets cited by AI at all. Your press hits aren’t just for the reader flipping through a magazine anymore. They’re training material for the machine deciding your product’s fate before a shopper opens a tab.
We also found something brands need to sit with. Similac still holds nearly 16% of the citation share we measured in AI answers, four years after its 2022 recall — a figure from our Baby Formula AI Visibility Index. ByHeart, which recalled product in November 2025, is sitting at 0.6%. I’m not saying one number causes the other. I’m saying AI doesn’t forget, and it doesn’t wait for you to move on from a bad news cycle before it decides what story to tell a new customer.
So what do you actually do about this. Stop treating your website, your press coverage, your retail listings and your reviews like four separate jobs run by four separate people who don’t talk to each other. They all feed the same system now. If your product page doesn’t answer the question a parent is actually asking, in plain language, an AI model has nothing to retrieve. If your last piece of earned coverage is two years old, you’re handing the model old evidence to work with. If your retail listing is missing basic facts, you can win every other channel and still lose the sale at checkout.
Trust now runs through a filter before it ever reaches a person. Ignore that filter, and you’re not just losing a search ranking. You’re losing the chance to be considered at all.
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