Ignite X

08/06/2026

Big news from the Ignite X team. 🥳

We’ve won the 2026 AEO Innovation Award in the MarTech Breakthrough Awards.

It’s for our Credibility Score, the tool we built to measure how AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity actually perceive a brand. More and more, your next customer asks AI before they ever visit your site, and we make sure the answer is you.

Grateful to the Martech Breakthrough judges, and to the clients who make this work so much fun.

See all the winners here: martechbreakthrough.com/2026-winners

Get Found. Get Cited. Get Chosen.

03/24/2026

For two decades, the playbook was simple: rank on Google and customers will find you. That’s still true, but there’s a new front door now. Buyers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity before they ever open a search tab, and AI platforms are converting at 2–3x the rate of traditional search. The surprising part? More than half of what AI cites comes from Reddit, Quora, and community conversations, not your website. And 73% of companies are actively blocking the AI crawlers that could be sending them customers. We dug into the data and what the smartest brands are doing differently.

https://ignitepr.com/blog-ai-is-the-new-front-door

03/20/2026

We audited a startup's AI visibility last month and the results were eye-opening. When we asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini about their category, the competitor showed up 11 times. Our client? Twice. The gap had nothing to do with product quality and everything to do with what AI systems had been taught to trust. We wrote about what that gap looks like, why it happens, and how to close it.

https://ignitepr.com/blog-close-the-gap

03/10/2026

We wrote a new piece about something we've been living with our clients in real time: the moment PR stopped being the "nice to have" and became the thing that actually determines whether AI can see your company at all.

For fifteen years, SEO won the budget conversation. Not because it was more strategic, but because it had better dashboards. Now AI has rewritten the rules, and the skills PR has always had (building credibility, earning trust, creating consensus across independent sources) are exactly what these systems use to decide who gets cited.

If you work in marketing, comms, or run a company, this one's worth the read.

03/03/2026

There's a new audience shaping how your company is perceived and it's not journalists, analysts, or customers. It's AI. We make the case for why every PR strategy now needs a parallel "machine relations" track, and what that means for how brands build credibility.

https://ignitepr.com/blog-machine-relations

02/19/2026

If your buyers are asking ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of Googling, your SEO playbook just expired. We break down what's replacing it — and why PR is the new search strategy.

60% of searches end without a click. The new currency isn't traffic — it's citations. Here's how to win in the era of AI-mediated discovery.