Identical banking queries posed to different AI platforms result in completely different top brand recommendations in 43% of cases, according to new research from Singapore-based agency PRecious Communications.The study, titled AI Authority Index: Banking and published in September, examined 1,628 matched comparisons across 11 AI service proxies (representing platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude) across six Southeast Asian markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.The findings reveal a fragmented AI visibility landscape for corporate communications professionals, as brand prominence fluctuates wildly depending on the platform, prompt framing, and language used.Key Findings: Language, Prompts, and Market Dominance• Platform Inconsistency: In 706 of 1,628 matched comparisons (43%), AI platforms named a different bank first despite receiving identical prompts.• Language Disparities: Brand rankings shifted significantly when queries were switched from English to local languages. Thailand saw the largest shift (60% of top-ranked banks changed between English and Thai answers), followed by Indonesia (38%), Vietnam (32%), the Philippines (30%), Malaysia (17%), and Singapore (15%). Local-language answers also cited fewer competitors overall (e.g., Malay responses named 1.36 fewer banks on average than English equivalents).• Inclusion vs. Top Rank Gap: Being mentioned by AI does not guarantee top positioning:o Singapore: DBS dominated both visibility (96.3% inclusion) and top ranking (81.7% first-mention share). While OCBC (87.5%) and UOB (84.2%) were frequently mentioned, they earned first-place mentions in only 5.4% and 6.3% of answers, respectively.o Malaysia: Maybank achieved a 91.7% inclusion rate and a 74.4% first-mention share, compared to CIMB's 78.9% inclusion and 2.2% top-rank share.o Philippines: BDO led in top rankings (50.6% first-mention share) despite a lower overall inclusion rate (76.1%) compared to BPI (82.8% inclusion, but only 16.1% first-mention share).• Category Complexity: Business banking queries prompted AI to recommend more brands (average 4.73 banks) compared to personal banking queries (3.52 banks), trust/selection queries (4.53 banks), and public-role queries (3.88 banks).Strategic Implications for Communications LeadersThe report underscores that traditional PR metrics—which measure mere brand mentions or volume—fail to account for how AI engines position brands against competitors.Echoing recent findings from agency Leoprd showing that higher citation volume doesn't inherently translate to stronger AI recommendations, PRecious Communications emphasized that brand reputation is now routinely shaped before companies have the opportunity to make their case directly to consumers. Regional teams monitoring AI visibility purely in English risk overlooking critical competitive dynamics in local-language AI ecosystems.(Photo by POURIA ???? on Unsplash)

As brands across the MENA region accelerate their adoption of generative AI, the challenge is shifting from simply producing content faster to using AI without losing cultural relevance, strategic judgement and brand quality. Tharaa Labs, the AI-focused sister entity of Pepper Communications Group, is positioning itself at this intersection, combining PCG’s regional communications experience with generative AI, digital strategy, visual communication and data intelligence.In this conversation with PR Post, Mohammed Shahid, Business Director, Tharaa Labs, discusses the company’s expansion plans across Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the evolving role of AI in MENA marketing, the need for cultural intelligence beyond localisation, and why human judgement will remain critical as AI-generated content scales.How does Tharaa Labs leverage its position as a sister entity of Pepper Communications Group (PCG) to support the visual communications and digital intelligence needs of brands across the MENA region, particularly within the UAE’s rapidly evolving media and marketing ecosystem?Tharaa Labs was set up to combine PCG's strategic communications experience with the capabilities of generative AI. That pairing is the advantage — PCG brings two decades of understanding how brands in this region build reputation, and we bring the tooling to execute at a speed and scale the market hasn't seen before.Practically, that means we work across the full stack: digital strategy, content production, visual communication, and the data layer that tells brands what's working. Our clients get agency judgement and AI leverage in one place, rather than having to stitch the two together.Very few agencies in the UAE are operating with that depth today, and it's a lead we intend to hold.Please talk about your plans to expand into Saudi Arabia and Qatar with offices slated for 2027. And what is your strategic roadmap for scaling Tharaa Labs’ operations and adapting to the unique demands of these new markets?Saudi Arabia and Qatar are both on the roadmap for 2027, and we're working through the groundwork now.The mistake we want to avoid is one we've watched plenty of international agencies make, which is treating the GCC as a single market. It isn't. Saudi's media landscape, its regulatory environment, and what audiences there respond to are all quite different from Qatar's, and both are different from the UAE. Content that performs in Dubai doesn't automatically travel.Tharaa Labs is taking the sequence seriously: we will build genuine local understanding first, hire from within each market, get the cultural and language nuance right, and then scale quickly once that foundation is in place. We'd rather move deliberately at the start and move fast later than the other way around.Why do you believe that successful artificial intelligence integration requires a comprehensive business strategy rather than just implementing new technology?Because buying a tool isn't a strategy. We see a lot of brands sign up for AI platforms, run them for a quarter, and end up with faster versions of work that wasn't delivering results in the first place.The harder questions come before the technology. What is the business actually trying to move - leads, brand recall, quality of content, cost per acquisition? Which parts of the current process are genuinely broken? Who owns the output once AI is producing it, and who signs off on quality? Most organisations haven't answered those, and no tool answers them for you.AI compresses the cost of execution dramatically. That's a real advantage, but only if the direction is right. If it isn't, you've just built a faster route to the wrong place.How is artificial intelligence fundamentally altering speed, scale, and quality for brands in the MENA region, and what constitutes this "new content advantage"?The obvious change is speed. Campaign assets that took three weeks now take three days, and that's real. But speed alone is the least interesting part of it.Scale is where MENA gets specific. Brands here are working across Arabic and English at minimum, often Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog and more, and across markets with different sensibilities. Producing genuinely localised work for each of those used to mean either a large budget or a compromise. That constraint is largely gone.Quality is the part people get wrong. AI doesn't raise your ceiling. It raises your floor, and it buys back the hours your team was spending on production so they can spend them on thinking.In what ways must organizations transition from basic localisation to true cultural intelligence when rethinking AI-generated content for diverse MENA audiences?Localisation asks whether the words are correct. Cultural intelligence asks whether the message belongs.Most AI output in Arabic is grammatically fine and tonally wrong. It defaults to Modern Standard Arabic when the conversation on the ground is Khaleeji, or Egyptian, or Levantine. It misses that a Ramadan campaign in the UAE and one in Saudi are not the same brief. It doesn't know that a large share of your audience in Dubai is South Asian and reading in English anyway.Those aren't translation problems. They're judgement problems, and they sit with people who live in these markets.Looking ahead to the next few years, what major shifts do you anticipate in how regional businesses balance automated digital intelligence with human-led visual and brand communications? The next two years will bring a flood of AI content, and most of it will be slop. Brands are already falling into that trap - producing volume because they can, without asking whether any of it deserves to exist.We're anti slop at Tharaa Labs, and that's not a slogan. Nothing leaves this agency without a human deciding it's good enough to carry a client's name on it.What I expect is a correction. Audiences are getting faster at spotting generated work, and the brands that flooded feeds with it will find it has cost them something they can't buy back quickly. The ones that held the line on craft will look conservative for a while and then look correct.The balance settles where it usually does automate the production, never the judgement. The machine makes it fast. Tharaa Labs team makes it worth watching.

Authored by : Lalit Sharma, Founder-CEO, PR Companion and Ethane Web TechnologiesFor about 20 years, marketers have treated ranking first on Google as the end goal of creating brand visibility. It was always simple: rank number one of Google, get the traffic on the website, it will generate leads & sales, and visibility will follow on its own. That equation has started to break down since generative AI entered search, and the scale of the shift is now visible in the numbers.A study published in March 2026 tracked 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs. As per the study, merely 38% of pages cited in Google’s AI Overviews were ranked in the top 10 organic results for the same search term. While the number was at 76% just seven months ago. In less than a year, the link between ranking position and AI citation has roughly been cut in half. The question worth asking is why. What changed in that window was not how Google ranks pages. It was what AI systems are actually built to do with them. Google’s ranking system and an AI system’s citation logic are answering two different questions. Google questions which page best matches the purpose behind a search, based on the relevance, backlinks and authority signals built up over years. On the other hand, an AI tool goes narrower. It questions which piece of content can be pulled out cleanly, trusted, and used to construct a direct answer. A page can be written to win on the first question and still fail the second. Long intros, storytelling build-up, and a key insight buried in paragraph twelve. All of this can still rank well on Google. None of it helps when an AI model is scanning for something it can lift and use immediately.This is where the gap actually opens up. Earlier, the ranking algorithms were built on just one factor: a page as a whole, its backlinks, its age, its topical depth, and its overall authority on a subject. On the other hand, AI tools narrow it down, often a single paragraph or even a sentence, and ask if it can establish itself as a fact or an answer. A brand can still invest a huge amount in strong domain authority but consist of vague answers and rank on Google because of the SEO. However, will AI cite that page on its chat? It is the question that has come to the surface. Simultaneously, a lesser-known page will clear answers and facts, backed with sources and structural content, and has a true chance to appear in AI searches. In simple words, ranking rewards a page's overall weight. Citation rewards the clarity of a single passage within it. In 2024, Gartner anticipated that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as generative AI tools held a growing share of queries that once were “Googled”. Though the projection has not come to exactly the same, as Google still handles the overwhelming majority of search queries around the world. However, there has been an underlying shift. AI systems increasingly standing between a question and its answer are now well documented and measurable.There is also a separate question worth asking: once a citation happens, what kind of content is actually being cited? In a Muck Rack report, ‘What is AI Reading’, the research suggests more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. The finding has held steady across all three editions: earned media, meaning independent, non-paid coverage, accounts for 84 per cent of everything these AI systems cite. Paid or advertorial content barely registers, at 0.3 per cent. Journalism specifically makes up around 27 per cent of citations. Put these three findings together and a pattern emerges. Ranking position is losing its grip on AI visibility. Traditional search volume itself is shrinking as a share of how people find answers. When AI cites something, it is the result of independent reporting done on the basis of third-party coverage far more often than owned brand content, no matter how well that content ranks.It does not mean that search engine optimization is irrelevant. Factors like domain authority, technical health and well-structured content still matter and serve as a base for AI systems. The only change that has come is that ranking on Google is not enough on its own. Earlier, it was seen as the endgame, now it is where the foundation is built. For anyone responsible for a brand's visibility, in marketing or in communications, the practical shift is in what gets measured and what gets prioritised. A page landing in position one is no longer proof that the job is done. Whether that brand is being cited by name in an AI-generated answer or where that citation is coming from – earned coverage, a forum thread, a comparison article, a product page – is becoming just as important to track. The data above suggests the businesses paying attention to that distinction now will be the ones still visible once the answer itself, not the link beneath it, becomes what most people actually see.

As we conclude another year, it is essential to reflect on the key developments, challenges, and achievements that have shaped different sectors throughout the past 12 months. The year 2024 has been marked by dynamic shifts, rapid innovation, and the continued adaptation to both external factors and emerging trends.Adgully?ÇÖs annual feature ?Çô REWIND ?Çô revisits different sectors and identifies the key developments as well gauges the long-term impacts of those developments. We speak to a cross-section of industry leaders to bring a 360-degree view of the industry landscape, the growth trends, financial performance, disruptions, innovations, challenges and more.In this Rewind 2024 article, Atul Sharma, CEO, Ruder Finn India and Head of Middle East, shares his insights into the defining trends and developments that shaped the PR industry this year. He also highlights the global challenges faced by the industry and reflects on how the year unfolded for the public relations industry.Additionally, Sharma sheds light on Ruder Finn?ÇÖs performance during 2024, emphasising the key achievements and milestones that marked the company?ÇÖs journey throughout the year.Overview of the PR industry in 2024This year has been full of challenges with wars across the Middle East and Russia, and on the other hand, elections across major democracies like India and the US added uncertainty for businesses everywhere. As a result, many companies scaled back their marketing budgets or paused PR programs. For the PR industry, which has usually seen strong double-digit growth, this year was definitely slow.With this uncertainty, communications and marketing teams are now under pressure to show how their efforts help achieve real business results. Clients are asking, ?Ç£How is this campaign helping us grow??Ç¥What?ÇÖs changed is that PR is no longer just about creating good stories ?Çô it?ÇÖs about helping businesses achieve their goals. This shift has made our role even more critical. We?ÇÖre not just business enablers anymore; we?ÇÖre directly helping brands deliver results ?Çô whether that?ÇÖs in sales, marketing, reputation or overall growth.This focus on measurable outcomes is especially strong in start-ups, tech forward companies and consumer brands. They?ÇÖre looking for PR campaigns that don?ÇÖt just grab attention, but also contribute to their business goals.Key Trends and DevelopmentsThis year, the rise of AI and its integration into communications has been the most talked-about trend. Tools like generative AI are being adopted not just for efficiency, but also for creativity ?Çô whether it?ÇÖs crafting compelling narratives or analyzing consumer sentiment at scale. At the same time, the industry has been navigating concerns around data privacy, misinformation, and bias in AI systems, especially in markets like India where cultural diversity adds layers of complexity.On the client side, there?ÇÖs been a significant demand for services like crisis management, internal communications, and thought leadership. Startups and B2B companies, in particular, have leaned heavily on public relations to build credibility and attract investors.Ruder Finn?ÇÖs growth story in 20242024 has been a year of milestones for Ruder Finn. Despite the challenges in the global business environment, we?ÇÖve focused on building deeper partnerships with our clients and expanding our offerings, delivering on profitability and growth. We?ÇÖve seen strong growth in demand for specialized services like crisis preparedness, brand positioning manuals and internal communications. This year, we?ÇÖve collaborated with some of the most exciting brands and startups in the consumer, technology and auto space, helping them craft narratives that drive business results.Being a tech-first firm, we have always been focused on what?ÇÖs next. This year with the launch of rf.aio, our AI-driven communications platform, RF will enable its clients to look at search optimization within the large language models domain. We are certain that it will help to enhance efficiency, provide sharper insights, and deliver real business impact for our clients in the medium to long term.On the talent front, our efforts to create a collaborative and non-hierarchical culture have paid off, building a stronger, more dynamic workforce. In an industry where talent is the real differentiator, we?ÇÖve placed people at the center of everything we do. We focussed on looking beyond the traditional talent pools. It?ÇÖs not just about hiring from marketing-related industries anymore; we?ÇÖre exploring unconventional spaces to bring in fresh perspectives. This year, we also saw the return of some former team members ?Çô our ?Ç£boomerang employees,?Ç¥ as we like to call them ?Çô which makes us proud of the culture we have built too.