Why Online Virality Doesn’t Equal AI Visibility

Creating “viral” content feels like a win. It might feel surreal and almost impossible to plan, but “going viral” means your content has been viewed by at least 500,000 to 1 million people (depending on the platform).

A viral piece of content requires immediate attention to maximize its influence – much like how the first 24 hours are essential for messaging during a crisis. It brings incredible exposure (though not always the best kind) and can be an exciting triumph for a communications professional.

It would only make sense that, as much as AI search has changed how marketing communication specialists approach public relations and organic search, online virality would lead to AI discoverability. But you would be surprised.

While viral content can drive views in the short term, it might not succeed in telling the right story for your brand and might be less useful to large language models (LLMs) than a well-crafted small article, interview or press release. In the long term, content optimized for answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) might be more valuable for your brand than a single viral post.

What Is Online Virality?

Online virality, otherwise known as a viral sensation or viral phenomenon, refers to a video, story or piece of content that spreads online at a remarkable pace, much like when a virus replicates and spreads through a community. You know when something has gone viral when you see it – out of nowhere, that content is everywhere, a constant topic of conversation. Think of the famous “is this dress blue and black, or yellow and gold” 2015 moment, and you’ve got a perfect example of a piece of online viral content.

What Is AI Visibility?

Simply put, AI visibility is how AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others cite brands. Much like search engine optimization (SEO), it influences how brands are discovered online – only unlike SEO, the focus is less on rankings and more on answers: Content that properly tells a brand story and answers common user questions is more likely to be visible and discovered by AI engines.

Many factors lead to AI visibility, but viral content rarely is one of them, since viral content typically fails to tell a larger story or answer a question – it just represents a moment where that content was incredibly popular. It tends to be more self-contained and less expansive than AEO- and GEO-crafted content.

Examples of Viral Content

While the famous blue-and-black-or-yellow-and-gold dress has already been discussed, here are some other notable moments of online viral content:

• The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (2014): We will talk about this later in this article, but this “challenge” to promote awareness of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) involved celebrities and everyday individuals pouring a bucket of ice water over themselves and “challenging” a friend to do the same. Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” ad (2010): An absurdist ad campaign for Old Spice deodorant, the initial commercial started with Isaiah Mustafa coming out of a shower, delivering a series of rapid-fire copy delivered to women viewers while dramatic background changes happen behind him, ending with the iconic line “I’m on a horse.”
• Spotify Wrapped (2016-present): Every year since 2016, Spotify releases individualized year-end lists of top artists, genres, songs and more for every user, making them easily shareable across all social media platforms.
• Charlie Bit My Finger (2007): A short family video of a young child holding his one-year-old brother, and his adorable, albeit pained, response to the toddler biting his finger.
• Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday (2007): A song by American musician Tay Zonday that went viral due to the somewhat “cheesy” yet earnest lo-fi homemade music video released for it, including captions like “I move away from the mic to breathe!”
• “Boom Goes the Dynamite” (2005): A disastrous sports report for the Ball State University newscast by freshman Brian Collins(which was the result of an inexperienced teleprompter operator accidentally fast-forwarding) was one of YouTube’s first truly viral videos thanks in part to Collins’s desperate whispers of “I’m so sorry” and his now-famous titular catchphrase.
• David After Dentist (2009): A home video of a 7-year-old being driven home after a dental visit, and his reaction to the anesthesia that had been administered, best known for its line, “Is this real life?”

What Is the Difference Between Being Seen and Being Understood?

Viral content is highly visible in the moment – it gets clicks, and it creates attention. That viewership is the primary result of virality. While viewership might lead to exposure, that exposure does not always make a brand more visible to AI systems. As AI powers more search, a gap is forming between brands focusing on more traditional tactics, like viral content and content that is specifically created to address user questions and provide high-authority information.

While a press release might receive fewer “views” than viral content, users and AI search engines can understand it. Similarly, an interview with a thought leader or a detailed article that properly tells a brand story won’t appear on any morning news programs as “trending.” But they will appear in AI search results because they’re rich in detailed, authoritative information. Unlike most viral content, AI-visible content includes:

• Specific facts
• Dates
• Quotations from thought leaders and executives
• Trustworthy sources
• Answer-driven information and data
• Easy-to-read structure

All of these approaches and more make the story much easier to understand for AI search engines and their users alike.

Going Viral Still Has Value

While creating content that is structured and optimized for artificial intelligence search engines has tremendous value, that doesn’t mean “going viral” has none. Social media and high-engagement platforms are still powerful tools for communicators. After all, who doesn’t want to see their campaign end up in earned media?

The tricky part is what you do with your viral moment. If you stay satisfied with the temporary boost from hundreds of thousands or millions of impressions, you’re only telling part of the story. Take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. All told, the participants raised over $220 million worldwide to support research into finding the cure for a debilitating illness. But ALS organizations didn’t simply pat themselves on the back for the eight-week period when seemingly every celebrity was swept up in the craze they created.

They built on it. If the ALS Association, Les Turner ALS Foundation and ALS Therapy Development Institute had simply embraced the donations and goodwill from this one-time event, the viral moment would be limited to a single moment in time, and future AI searches would only cite the single viral aspect of the campaign – people dunking themselves in ice water.

Instead, these organizations built fundraising campaigns around the viral moment, created content across platforms to take advantage of the moment and, most importantly, made sure that content included data, facts and information about the cause, tying the moment to their larger story. Even before the days of AEO and GEO, these organizations used their viral moment to build a campaign built for the future AI marketing landscape.

How Multichannel Amplification™ Can Impact AI Visibility (and Capitalize on Viral Moments)

Multichannel Amplification™ helps your brand leverage multiple communication channels to deliver brand campaign messages, sending the right messages to the right channels at the right times.

When you have a strong story or piece of content to share (like, say, one that goes viral), it should not simply live in that one space. It should live across multiple channels, from press releases to social media to articles and earned media that all drive home the same message and tell the same story.

Each of these channels has a different purpose. Still, if you ensure you are reinforcing the same underlying message across all these channels, you establish trustworthiness and authority, part of the Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) that makes content more visible in both traditional and AI search.

Online virality typically comes from a single isolated source, while AI visibility lives in verified sources across channels sharing the same brand story. When information about a company is consistent across its multiple credible sources, generative AI engines are more likely to cite and reference the content, increasing brand visibility in AI search.

This is important because AI discovery can be stronger when the source content is not isolated to a single page. When information about a company is consistent across multiple credible sources, it becomes easier to establish context around that organization and its areas of expertise. Multichannel Amplification™ and tools like PR Newswire Amplify™ ensure consistency of message, which helps make your content more discoverable online.

Virality Is Fleeting. Don’t Let Your Content Be.

As Andy Warhol famously said in 1967, one day “everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.” Now the term “15 minutes of fame” is usually reserved for those individuals, brands and causes that suddenly catch fire on the internet for a brief period of time before fading into obscurity, best reserved for fun trivia icebreaker questions.

Being discovered is one thing, but staying discoverable is entirely different. Focus on content that achieves the following:

• Offers clear, specific information.
• Provides expertise and credible sources.
• Owns original data, infographics and insights.
• Has answer-driven content.
• Maintains consistent messaging across channels.
• Is written with easy-to-read structure and formatting.
• Creates content that remains useful beyond the news cycle.

Once you’ve created content built to be found across channels with the same strong message, you’ll find that in the long term, you’ll achieve much more than a viral moment.

Frequently Asked Questions About Virality and AI Visibility

What is the difference between online virality and AI visibility?

Online virality is defined by getting a lot of attention and views, while AI visibility is defined by being understood and cited by AI platforms.

Does viral content improve AI visibility?

Not necessarily. Viral content often captures a single moment without providing the detailed facts, context and answers that AI systems need.

What makes content more AI visible?

AI-visible content includes specific facts, dates, expert quotations, trustworthy sources, original data and an easy-to-read structure.

How can brands turn a viral moment into AI visibility?

Brands can build on viral content by sharing the same core message across press releases, social media, articles and earned media, creating a consistent and authoritative story across channels.

Want to amp up your AI discoverability? Request a demo for PR Newswire Amplify™, our powerful press release campaign tool powered by AI that can help guide you in constructing your content for AI search visibility.