When communicators publish a report, press release or research finding, we usually want to know one thing: did the right people see it? That question is starting to change, says Hezron Ochiel, Deputy Corporate Communications Manager at Kenya Medical Training College, and Founder of Hezron Insights.
As more people use AI tools to find information, communicators also need to ask whether their organisation’s knowledge can actually be found and surfaced in those answers.
I began thinking seriously about this while analysing 1 083 verifiable citations used by ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek and Perplexity when answering humanitarian questions about ten African countries.
The study, African Humanitarian AI Citation Index, found that only 5.5% of the citations came from organisations based in the country being discussed. Nearly seven in ten, or 68.8%, came from UN agencies and other multilateral organisations.
The numbers were striking, but what interested me more was what they might mean for communication practice.
An organisation can publish good information and still struggle to become visible when people turn to AI for answers.
AI is Becoming Part of How People Find Information
Communication teams have always thought about visibility.
We manage websites, publish research, build relationships and try to make sure useful information reaches the people who need it.
AI is becoming another route to find that information. People already use these tools to get background, understand unfamiliar issues and identify sources worth reading. What appears in those answers can influence where they look next.
That makes AI visibility something communication professionals need to pay attention to.
African Organisations are Already Producing Valuable Evidence
The problem has never been that African institutions have nothing to say.
Government agencies, universities, media organisations, NGOs and research institutions are already publishing useful information across the continent.
The harder question is whether that information is easy to find and clearly connected to the organisation that produced it.
A strong report, for example, can sit online for years and attract little attention if it is buried inside a poorly labelled PDF, lacks clear authorship or sits on a website that is difficult to navigate.
That is a publishing problem before it becomes an AI problem.
Large international organisations often have an advantage because they have spent years building strong websites, searchable archives and consistent publishing systems.
African organisations may produce equally valuable information but have fewer routes for that work to become visible.
Kenya Raises an Interesting Question
One finding in the study stood out. Of the 60 country-local citations identified across the ten-country dataset, 31 came from Kenyan organisations.
Kenya therefore accounted for more than half of all the local citations found.
That does not mean Kenyan organisations have solved the visibility challenge. It does show that local African sources can appear in AI-generated answers.
What we still do not know is why this happened more often in Kenya than in some of the other countries studied.
Several factors could be at play, including website authority, publishing practices and accessibility. The study was not designed to isolate those factors, so that question needs further research.
For communicators, though, the broader lesson is already familiar. Information is more useful when people can find it easily and know where it came from.
What Communication Teams Can Do
This does not require communication professionals to become AI specialists. It starts with good publishing.
Important organisational knowledge should remain easy to find long after the day it is released. Clear authorship, dates, source attribution and consistent organisational naming all help.
Where possible, important findings should also live on accessible web pages, not only inside downloadable reports.
Earned visibility matters too.
When credible media and other trusted institutions reference your work, they create more ways for people to encounter your organisation and its ideas.
These are familiar communication practices. The difference is that they now matter in an information environment where machines are also helping people decide what to read next.
Discoverability is Becoming Part of the Job
The fundamentals of communication, like good writing and credible evidence, still remain unchanged.
What has changed is how people reach that information.
Communication professionals therefore need to think beyond the immediate reach of a story, report or social post.
We also need to think about what happens later, when someone asks an AI tool about our organisation, our sector or an issue we understand well.
If credible African knowledge is missing from that answer, the communication problem may have started long before the prompt was typed.
For more information, visit www.hezroninsights.com. You can also follow Hezron Insights on Facebook, LinkedIn, or on X.
*Image courtesy of contributor