PR is moving faster than ever. Human behavior, influence channels, and the whole digital world shift so often it’s enough to give you whiplash. Add in AI and the evolution of search, and B2B discoverability has become a game of 3D chess.
Right now, everyone is looking for the "fast, efficient, and cheap" way to use new tools to solve old problems like volume and crawlability. Brands are panicking and agencies are pivoting, but here’s the reality: You can’t automate experience. You can buy the latest software, but you can’t buy the years of intuition it takes to know which stories will actually land. Similarly, agency leads will say sure when a client says “make it go viral,” while a social creator cringes in the background. Your social team knows that virality requires that instinct; it’s not something you can manufacture. Building a strategy takes patience, a "do more with less" philosophy, and, most importantly, human connection. That’s why we built Althea Labs.
The Storytelling Deficit
It turns out, I’m not the only one who thinks so. Even the Wall Street Journal is reporting that companies are "desperately seeking storytellers" to make sense of their data and connect with actual humans. Yet the pressure everywhere else is to make content fast, efficient, and cheap, which, with the world and economy what it is, puts actual creative storytellers in a tough spot. My entire philosophical approach to work and life is remembering that everyone is a human being. We are all looking for genuine connection and meaningful contributions.
Our superpower at Althea Labs exists outside of the many tools that tell you how your content is performing. Graphite finds that AI now writes about as many of the new articles published online as humans do, yet both search engines and AI models still overwhelmingly prefer human-written content: 82% of the articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity, and 86% of the articles ranking in Google Search, are written by humans. The customers you want to attract aren’t tools. They’re people just like you.
The "PR Plus" Methodology
Modern discovery is interconnected. In a Brookings/NORC survey from June 2025, 57% of Americans said they had used generative AI for at least one personal purpose, and about three quarters of them used it to search for information, which is why we developed our "PR Plus" Methodology. It runs earned media, site infrastructure, community presence and content as one system, so each makes the others more findable; the methodology page sets out all four components and the five steps.
Community matters more than most brands expect. Reddit was the largest single external source AI engines cited in Foundation's 2026 study of 50 B2B brands: 21% of top external citations, rising to 31% on unbranded discovery queries. Part 4 of the Althea Score goes deeper on it.
Technical Roots, Human Voice
You may need a technical strategy to speak to the "tools" so your company can reach a person, but once you get there, the rest of your content needs an authentic voice and valuable substance so that a person can connect with what you do in a real way. We are technical experts grounded in human storytelling.
Althea Labs blends experienced analysis of tool data with deep roots in online culture. We help your team hone their message so that every insight from a tool becomes a brainstorm, and every brainstorm becomes a piece of content that actually lands with the people you want to reach.
Althea Labs is rooted in what great PR has always been: telling authentic stories, creating trust, and building real relationships. We’re just doing it now with a GEO-first lens (generative engine optimization: making sure AI engines can find and cite you, which our guide to AI visibility explains in full). Why? Because human experience matters deeply. Period.
Ready to See Where You Stand?
Every Althea Labs engagement starts with an audit. We show you exactly where your brand stands in search, in AI, and in the communities where your buyers actually are, then show you what it would take to build from there.
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