Golin Ketchum

How Golin Ketchum turns AI visibility tracking into source-led strategy

In the age of generative AI, brands need to understand when, how, and why they appear in LLM-generated answers. For Golin Ketchum, a global PR agency serving consumer brands across international markets, that requires credible AI intelligence it can quickly turn into action.

Traditional SEO tools provide a detailed view of a brand’s conventional search performance, but Golin Ketchum also needs to analyze the broader source ecosystem shaping AI-led reputation and discovery, including earned media, social content, influencers, and brand-owned pages.

Meltwater GenAI Lens allows the agency’s Research and Analytics team to build and refine prompt sets around specific business challenges or interests. AI visibility metrics, citations, key phrases, and named entities help the team identify the sources most relevant to each client.

“Other providers are very rigid. You sort of have to go in knowing exactly what information you want to get out,” says John Brasington, Golin Ketchum’s Practice Director of Research and Analytics. “With Meltwater’s setup, we can research and find out where the really interesting bits of data are.”

Those insights guide the strategy. Social citations can signal influencer opportunities, earned-media sources can inform priority publication lists, and brand-owned pages can reveal where website content needs attention. The team can then monitor results daily, weekly, or monthly based on their client’s needs.

How Golin Ketchum more than doubled a healthcare brand’s AI visibility

For one of Golin Ketchum’s clients, an established over-the-counter healthcare brand competing in a crowded supplements category, visibility in AI-driven discovery had become increasingly important.

Golin Ketchum built a prompt framework based on the marketing funnel and used Google Search data as a proxy for where audience interest likely lay. Broad health questions represented awareness, product questions reflected consideration, and prompts such as “best X for Y” and “where can I buy” indicated purchase intent. This allowed the team to measure AI visibility at each stage rather than rely on one overall score.

The analysis showed that medical journals shaped many awareness-stage answers, while earned media and the brand’s website played a larger role closer to purchase. Using influential citations identified through Meltwater, Golin Ketchum prioritized relevant media targets and launched a complementary PR campaign.

The campaign secured 15 national news placements, more than 200 newswire pickups, and four consumer trade placements. Before the campaign, the brand appeared inconsistently in commercial, bottom-of-funnel AI results. When it did appear, it was often positioned as an “also consider” option rather than a leading recommendation. 

Following the campaign, the brand began ranking consistently among the top three recommendations for high-intent prompts. Because exact positions can fluctuate across generative AI platforms, Golin Ketchum evaluates brands across three visibility tiers: Invisible, Contending, and Leading. A Leading position means consistently ranking within the top three, making the brand far more likely to be prominently recommended during critical purchase-stage decisions.

Across 5,000 monitored prompts, the brand’s overall AI visibility also rose from less than 7% to a peak of 14% in four months. It became the top recommendation for a priority purchase-stage prompt in two of the four AI models tracked.

With Meltwater, Golin Ketchum was able to not only create an AI-ready PR strategy, but also continuously measure and report on the results. Being able to prove impact has been invaluable for getting new initiatives approved and put into action.

“I hear many brands and even agencies struggle with inertia or decision paralysis,” says Brasington. “Our approach with Meltwater gets past that. Flexibility leads to agility, agility leads to focus and precision on what matters, which leads to action, impact and learnings.

How Golin Ketchum scaled AI visibility audits across more brands and markets

Meltwater allows Golin Ketchum to extend AI brand monitoring across a larger client portfolio. Rather than committing resources to fixed markets or processing extensive datasets before analysis can begin, the team can adjust prompts and shift between brands and markets as priorities change.

By surfacing PR-relevant sources and entities, Meltwater helps the team focus on interpretation: where a brand lacks visibility, which sources warrant deeper analysis, and what actions clients should prioritize.

This flexibility increased Golin Ketchum’s capacity from one or two AI visibility audits per month to as many as 12 concurrent mini-audits. The agency can now support more brands and expand the work into new markets.

Ongoing AI visibility reporting also creates a repeatable measurement cycle. The team can establish a baseline, identify influential sources, recommend an activation, and track changes over time, using the results to refine their strategies.

With GenAI Lens from Meltwater, Golin Ketchum has the intelligence it needs to help more client brands navigate generative AI discovery and strengthen their AI visibility with confidence.