AI is quietly rewriting
your brand narrative

We’re seeing a familiar pattern emerge: clients ask ChatGPT about a disease area, treatment pathway or, increasingly, their own brand. They don’t love its answer and come to us with a request: Can we influence what AI says?

The question makes complete sense – especially considering what’s happening at scale.

At this month’s launch of ChatGPT Health, OpenAI shared that hundreds of millions of health-related questions are asked in ChatGPT every single week. Not searches. Questions. Framed in natural language, often personal and often urgent.

This number will only accelerate. As large language models get easier to access, more deeply integrated and increasingly trusted, AI is becoming the default health information starting point for patients, caregivers, policymakers and healthcare professionals (HCPs) alike. It’s gone mainstream.

What makes this noteworthy isn’t just the volume of questions, but where AI sits in the decision process. AI doesn’t simply retrieve information; AI interprets, summarises and prioritises it, deciding what context matters – and what can be left out. AI, not you, chooses what your customers see and the story being told.

Many organisations still dismiss this as ‘just another channel’. As marketers and communicators, we constantly adapt to new formats, after all.

This time it’s different.

In practice, AI shapes understanding before someone ever visits a website, reads an article or speaks to a human expert. That makes AI a decision layer, not a distribution channel.

This means every brand has a new target audience: patients, HCPs and now machines. The models that are forming – and spreading – an understanding of the health landscape for everyone’s benefit.

When leaders want to influence AI, they’re often reacting to a loss of narrative control.

For years, digital visibility felt manageable. If something wasn’t working, you could adjust messaging, publish something new or lean on a familiar playbook.

AI is another story.

What shows up in a ChatGPT response isn’t driven by one asset, campaign or update. It’s the product of patterns learned over time, across countless sources, reinforced through repetition and credibility.

AI understands based on what is consistently present, corroborated and seen as authoritative. Your perspective carries no weight if it’s fragmented, underrepresented or difficult for AI to interpret. Where context is missing, the model fills in the gaps itself, using the best information it can find.

That’s where risk enters. Absent any key fact, AI steps in and the story can drift into oversimplified, wrong or unsafe guidance.

For pharma leaders, this shift cuts deep.

Earned media, corporate narratives, disease education, brand reputation – these have always mattered. But now they’re doing double duty, shaping both human perception and the inputs AI systems rely on to generate answers.

Most models already understand the disease area and treatment set. The risk lies in those new data points, critical label details or real-world use cases that sit beyond AI’s reach.

Many organisations struggle here; not for lack of content, but because facts are split across teams and formats – behind logins, paywalls or structures AI can’t read well. The result is an uneven record and AI doesn’t reconcile the differences kindly. It averages them.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) exists to address this strategic shift.

GEO isn’t for tweaking prompts or chasing rankings. It’s meant to shape the context AI learns from in the first place – making sure the full story is easy to find, trust and connect.

Before asking how to influence the answer, organisations must assess:
• What does AI believe is true about our category and which voices shape that belief?
• Where are we absent, oversimplified or misunderstood?
• Which signals reinforce the wrong narrative?

That’s the mindset shift.

This is why today’s leading teams start with diagnosis, not optimisation – using GEO audits to understand how they’re represented across AI systems, where authority is being borrowed or lost and what needs to change structurally.

CognitevGEO can support that shift – not as a scorecard or quick fix, but to align communications, marketing and expertise around the full context AI uses to form its worldview – a core principle of Intelligent Commercialization at Inizio.

AI won’t wait for your upcoming content or big launch. It’s forming its view millions of times each week, based on the signals that already exist and delivering it directly to your customers.

Don’t let AI rewrite your narrative. Ask instead: How can we influence what AI says – strategically, now?

Julie O'Donnell is EVP, Global Head of Digital at Inizio Evoke Comms